It makes absolute sense, but still comes as a relief, that Barron's foray into crime writing would become increasingly immersed in the Weird, albeit carefully staying on the other side of the line from the outright supernatural. Nonetheless, by the end of this book, you're ready for about anything to happen, like if Ellroy or Crumley fell in love with Lovecraft rather than Chandler. Coleridge is an ex mob enforcer, current private detective trying to channel his propensity for and affinity with mayhem and violence into being, roughly, one of the good guys, not so much on a quest for redemption as a modification of his self-image. Hired by a an ex-cop turned bodyguard for a wealthy tech guy turned politician (everyone in these books has gone through more jobs and identities than I have white t-shirts from Dunnes) to look into the death of his nephew at a now-mothballed Large Hadron Collidor site, Colerdige tools up and heads down into a creepy Valley with a dark past and darker subterranean secrets, tussling with a group of bizarre pantheistic cultists who are catspaws of the local super-wealthy family behind the Collidor and its darker purpose. Phew. 

It's pure Barron, dark lyrcism and characters who self-identify as Epic, with a strange dark howling laughter suffusing every sentence. Dark, blood-soaked history and dark blood-soaked bursts of violence, but this eats at your brain with its intimations of nihilistic billionaires engaging in blood sacrifice and dabbling in apocalypse, and our small but thus-far indestructable protagonist creeping about its edges.

2022 - relistened and enjoyed.