Book(s) Review(s): Hollow Man and Dominic by Mark Pryor

You’re in for a treat today – two books in a brilliant new-ish series from one of my favorite authors, the exceptionally talented Mark Pryor. I’ve read every book in his Hugo Marston series – it’s a marvelous mystery series featuring an ex-pat former CIA agent who is now living in Paris as the head of security for the American Embassy. The books are populated by a marvelously original cast of characters, the writing is fantastic (as is the pacing), and the story lines are all unique and can be read as stand-alone mysteries but there is a delicious build based on Hugo’s backstory that is finally (as of the latest, book 7) coming to a head and promises great things when it eventually erupts over the edges of everything and everyone…

But enough of that. This is about ANOTHER great Pryor series: The Hollow Man books.

The first, Hollow Man, introduces Dominic – a lawyer, Englishman-living-in-Texas, musician. Who also happens to be a psychopath. Seriously. Imagine Dexter but with lawyers. Then throw out that mental picture. Dominic is infinitely more complex and fascinating than any psychopath I’ve come across in fiction (and, odd though it is to realize this, there have been a lot of them, especially lately!) and because Pryor’s writing won’t leave you any room for comparisons – you’ll be too busy catching your breath at the casual reveals that are tossed out, Usual Suspects-style, at the most unsuspecting and innocent-seeming moments throughout the story…

This is first-class fiction. There are mysteries and secrets and double-crosses. There is liquid-nitrogen cold calculation, shameless manipulation, and pitch-black humor. And it’s all written in crisp, clear language that forces you into the room – and Dominic’s head – exactly at the moment designed to make you the most uncertain and leery of everyone and everything around you. And I cannot get over the incredible pacing and timing that Pryor demonstrates time and again; he leads you right up to the edge of the cliff and then…leaves you there. Then two pages later he sends you pinwheeling into free-fall, at the moment you least expect it. It’s a marvelous storytelling style, and when you couple it with well-conceived plots and original slants on even the most banal of activities (even when the characters are making poor or stereotypical decisions, you just know Pryor made them so for a reason, and that reason is to throw you for so many loops you won’t be able to see straight for a week), the result is a book you can’t put down.

The second book, Dominic, continues in the exact same vein but adds a new wrinkle: an alternate narrator. At first I will admit I stumbled with this a bit. Brian is no Dominic – and that’s made abundantly clear when you find yourself inside his head. It’s a churched-up, flimsy, naughehyde place to be. I found myself annoyed being there and if I didn’t like it I knew Dominic wouldn’t be caught dead there. Unless he needed to be… And that’s where the fun begins, really. Once I realized that, I fell into the discordant rhythm of the two men’s voices and found the music atonal but still oddly compelling. It made for an interesting sideways view of each character, allowing peripheral vision to bring them each into fuller perspective than they had when everything was relayed through the single lens of Dominic.

And then when Pryor added in Elizabeth (Dominic’s “special lady”) at the end, things really started spinning – in the best, most nausea-inducing, way possible. I simply can’t believe how well Pryor manages secrets and reveals; he makes surgical cuts, slipping in Junior Mints with scalpels (if you don’t get the Junior Mints reference, it’s from Seinfeld – and you are too young to read this if you don’t know who Seinfeld is, seriously…) and the result is brilliance. I couldn’t believe the reveal that came in – literally – the last words of the book. I probably should have seen it coming, but I totally didn’t because with Dominic you never know what (or who) to believe. That’s a huge credit to Pryor, and I hope that he plans to keep Dominic around for a while because the stories are incredible…

I originally read Hollow Man via a library copy. I just reread it with a review copy provided by the great folks at Seventh Street Books. Seventh Street also provided my copy of Dominic.