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Overview
In Steelton, a struggling Midwestern city on the cusp of an economic turnaround, two prominent men are found dead within days of each other. One is Tommy Fielding, a senior officer of the company building a new baseball stadium, the city's hope for the future. The other is Jack Novak, the local drug dealers' attorney of choice. Fielding's death with a prostitute, from an overdose of heroin, seems accidental; Novak is apparently the victim of a ritual murder. But in each case the character of the dead man seems contradicted by the particulars of his death. Coincidence or connection?
The question falls to Assistant County Prosecutor Stella Marz. Despite a traumatic breach with her alcoholic and embittered father, she has risen from a working-class background to become head of the prosecutor's homicide unit. A driven woman, she is called the Dark Lady by defense lawyers for her relentless, sometimes ruthless, style: in seven years only one case has gotten away from her, and only because the defendant took his own life. She has earned every inch of both her official and her off-the-record titles, and recently she's decided to go after another: to become the first woman elected Prosecutor of Erie County. But that was before the brutal murder of her ex-lover--Jack Novak.
Novak's death leads her into a labyrinth where her personal and professional lives become dangerously intertwined. There is the possibility that Novak fixed drug cases for the city's crime lord, Vincent Moro, with the help of law enforcement personnel, and perhaps with someone in Stella's own office . . . the bitter mayoral race which threatens to undermine her own ambitions . . . her attraction to a colleague who may not be what he seems . . . the lingering, complicated effects of her painful affair with Novak . . . the growing certainty that she is being watched and followed. Making her way through a maze of corruption, deceit, and greed, trusting no one, Stella comes to believe that the search for the truth involves the bleak history of Steelton itself--a history that now endangers her future, and perhaps her life.
For his uncanny dialogue, subtle delineation of character, and hypnotic narrative, critics have compared Richard North Patterson to John O'Hara and Dashiell Hammett. Now, in the character of the Dark Lady, he has created a woman as fascinating as her world is haunting. Dark Lady is his signature work.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780307833891 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Random House Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 01/16/2013 |
| Sold by: | Random House |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 448 |
| Sales rank: | 59,660 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
In the moments before the brutal murder of Jack Novak ended what she later thought of as her time of innocence, Assistant County Prosecutor Stella Marz gazed down at the waterfront of her native city, Steelton.
At thirty-eight, Stella would not have called herself an innocent. Nor was the view from her corner office one that lightened her heart. The afternoon sky was a close, sunless cobalt, typical of Steelton in winter. The sludge-gray Onandaga River divided the city as it met Lake Erie beneath a steel bridge: the valley carved by the river was a treeless expanse of railroad tracks, boxcars, refineries, cranes, chemical plants, and, looming over all of this, the smokestacks of the steel mills--squat, black, and enormous--on which Steelton's existence had once depended. From early childhood, Stella could remember the stench of mill smoke, the stain left on the white blouse of her school uniform drying on her mother's clothesline; from her time in night law school, she recalled the evening that the river had exploded in a stunning instant of spontaneous combustion caused by chemical waste and petroleum derivatives, the flames which climbed five stories high against the darkness. Between these two moments--the apogee of the mills and the explosion of the river--lay the story of a city and its decline.
By heritage, Stella herself was part of this story. The mills had boomed after the Civil War, manned by the earliest wave of immigrants--Germans and British, Welsh and Irish--who, in the early 1870s, had worked fourteen hours a day, six days a week. Their weekly pay was $11.50; in 1874, years of seething resentment ignited a strike, with angry workers demanding twenty-five cents more a week. The leading owner, Amasa Hall, shut down his mills, informing the strikers that, upon reopening, he would give jobs only to those who agreed to a fifty-cent cut. When the strikers refused, Hall boarded his yacht and embarked on a cruise around the world.
Hall stopped at Danzig, then a Polish seaport on the Baltic. He advertised extensively for young workers, offering the kingly wage of $7.25 a week and free transport to America. The resulting wave of Polish strikebreakers--poor, hardworking, Roman Catholic, and largely illiterate--had included Stella's great-grandfather, Carol Marzewski. It was on their backs that Amasa Hall had, quite systematically, undercut and eventually wiped out the other steel producers in the area, acquiring their mills and near-total sway over the region's steel industry. And it was the slow, inexorable decline of those same mills into sputtering obsolescence which had left Stella's father, Armin Marz, unemployed and bitter.
Recalling the flames which had leaped from the Onandaga, a brilliant orange-blue against the night sky, had reminded Stella of another memory from childhood, the East Side riots. Just as the West Side of Steelton was home to European immigrants--the first wave had been joined by Italians, Russians, Poles, Slovaks, and Austro-Hungarians--so the city's industry had drawn a later influx of migrants from the American South, the descendants of former slaves, to the eastern side of the Onandaga. But these newcomers were less welcomed, by employers or the heretofore all-white labor force. Stella could not remember a time in her old neighborhood, Warszawa, when the black interlopers were not viewed with suspicion and contempt; the fiery explosion of the East Side into riots in the sixties--three days of arson and shootouts with police--had helped convert this into fear and hatred. A last trickle of nonwhites--Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Koreans, Haitians, Chinese, and Vietnamese--felt welcome, if at all, only on the impoverished East Side. And so the split symbolized by the Onandaga hardened, and racial politics became as natural to Steelton as breathing polluted air.
This divide, too, shadowed Stella's thoughts. In the last six years, she had won every case but one--a hung jury following the murder trial of a high school coach who had made one of his students pregnant and who, devastated by Stella's particularly ruthless cross-examination, had thereafter committed suicide. It was this which had led a courtroom deputy to give Stella a nickname which now enjoyed wide currency among the criminal defense bar: the Dark Lady. But only recently had they become aware of her ambition, long nurtured, to become the first woman elected Prosecutor of Erie County.
Though this was a daunting task, it was by no means impossible. Stella was a daughter of the West Side, a young woman her neighborhood was proud of--an honors student who had worked through college and law school; had remained an observant Catholic; had not turned her back on Steelton and its problems, as had so many of her generation; had already become head of her office's homicide unit. Stella was not a vain woman, and had always seen herself with objectivity: though she lacked the gifts for bonhomie and self-promotion natural to many politicians, she was articulate, truthful, and genuinely concerned with making her office, and her city, better. She was attractive enough without being threatening to other women, with a tangle of thick brown hair; pale skin; a broad face with a cleft chin and somewhat exotic brown eyes, a hint of Eurasia which Stella privately considered her best feature; a sturdy build which she managed to keep trim through relentless exercise and attention to diet, yet another facet of the self-discipline which had been hammered into her at home and school. And if there were no husband or children to soften the image of an all-business prosecutor or, Stella thought ruefully, her deepening sense of solitude, at least there was no one to object or to say, as Armin Marz might, had he not lost the gifts of memory and reason, that she was reaching above herself.
But her biggest problem, Stella knew, was not that she was a woman. It was as clear to her as the river which divided her city: she was a white ethnic with no base on the black East Side. And with that, her thoughts, and her gaze, moved to the most hopeful, most problematic, aspect of the cityscape before her--the steel skeleton of the baseball stadium Mayor Krajek had labeled Steelton 2000.
Interviews
On Wednesday, August 25th, bn.com welcomed author Richard North Patterson to discuss his latest novel, DARK LADY.
Moderator: Welcome, Richard North Patterson! We are so pleased that you could join us to discuss your work and especially your latest thriller, DARK LADY. How are you tonight?
Richard North Patterson: I am terrific!
Jennie from New York, NY: I really like the fact that you raise the issue of urban revitalization in DARK LADY. Which of your characters do you agree with: Do you feel that the huge construction of a stadium or other entertainment complex helps out cities in distress, or do you feel such things waste money that should be spent on law enforcement, education, and social programs?
Richard North Patterson: First of all, I think this is a great question. I have a bottom line. I think of balance: If it is not an utter stripping of urban resources, then having major league sports is part of the identity of a city. For example, the image of Cleveland has gone from a river that catches fire because of pollution to the renewed areas surrounding Jacobs Field. It is hard to put a price on that. It means that younger people are living downtown and that Cleveland is on the map again for corporate relocation. In other words, it takes on a symbolic importance that transcends economic importance. On the other hand, it is clear that most of the arguments trumpeting near-term and dramatic benefits don't stand up to close scrutiny. First, the expenses are greater. For example, increased expenses for police, transportation, and road access aren't things that one thinks about, yet they cost millions. And typically taxpayers foot the bill, which means that schools, law enforcement, and social services all suffer. I admire cities that have looked at their resources and have just said that they will not follow the siren song of being "big league" by helping wealthy owners become richer. The long-term benefits of sports in the right situation, however, have been recently demonstrated by Cleveland. In the end, what is really missing is an honest dialogue. Stadium proponents lie about the economic benefits, and opponents tends to ignore the long-term and psychic benefits. It is so much like our politics: too oversimplified and not honest enough.
Peter from Chicago, IL: How did your extensive experience in the law profession affect your perspective as a writer? What did you gain from it and would you ever practice law again?
Richard North Patterson: First, I love the law, but I will never practice again. I have the rare opportunity to do self-assigned work and go wherever my interests or passions take me. But I owe my writing career to having been a lawyer. It gave me a subject that is of fundamental social importance: for better or worse many of the great political and social controversies wind up in a courtroom. It taught me about necessity. It taught me to be a student of human nature. It made me a storyteller; a good lawyer has to organize messy facts into a coherent and persuasive narrative to persuade a jury. If you take those two elements -- storytelling and an interest in people -- you have many tools to apply to the business of writing novels. Finally, I had to do a lot of legal writing. Contrary to popular belief, the best legal writing is clear and cogent. After all, lawyers write for America's most tired and cynical audience -- judges and law clerks -- and if it is not clear and persuasive, they may very well tune you out.
Karen from California: I just started DARK LADY last night, and I love it already! My favorite of all time is SILENT WITNESS, and I wonder whether you would ever plan on a sequel to that book -- or any other title for that matter?
Richard North Patterson: I never say never, and I enjoyed Tony Lord immensely, but the very reason that I -- and it seems you -- enjoyed the SILENT WITNESS experience is that we were able to learn so much about Tony as a person. I like to delve into people's lives and how their past affects how they behave in the present. But that means in any common book I have told a great deal of their story, so I tend to move on and develop secondary characters more fully, as I am doing with Stella Marz in DARK LADY. But my characters do tend to show up again over time. For example, I am working on a new book in which Kerry Kilcannon from NO SAFE PLACE and Caroline Masters from FINAL JUDGMENT are both principal characters. I think it will be fun to get them together. I suspect this book will be out in early 2001. I haven't started writing it yet.
Steve from Connecticut: I love your characterizations. How do you get the sense of melancholy and pain into your characters? Because even the "happiest" people battle with these "private" issues.
Richard North Patterson: That is a great question. Someone once said to me that she couldn't write fiction because she didn't want to think about unpleasant things. In a way, writing fiction is like going to a psychiatrist: The real insights are purchased at the cost of discomfort or even pain. Sometimes that involves facing an unpleasant personal experience. We have all had difficulty with parents and are forced to think about how they have affected our lives. We have all had relationships with friends or lovers that, to some extent, are unhealthy and harmful. We have all failed. If we have kids, we try always to do the best we can. It is not fun to face this, but it is a universal part of the human condition; and this knowledge enriches our writing. There are many experiences I have not had. I have written about domestic violence and mistreatment of children. yet I have never experienced that in my own life. But I feel it is terribly important to deal with these subjects, so I try to open my mind and imagination. I go out and interview people who have had the experience or people who have dealt personally or professional with those who have. This is the only way that I can pay proper respect to their experience and give my readers the authentic sense of reality that they deserve.
Dale from Springfield, OH: I enjoyed your book and wonder why you chose to tell your tale through the voice of a woman?
Richard North Patterson: Oh boy! First, women are 50 percent of the population. Later on this evening, my wife and I are having dessert with a U.S. senator who is a woman. A few minutes ago Laurie asked me how many of the 100 U.S. senators are women. We came up with 8 -- 8 percent of the U.S. Senate. That statistic alone suggests the continuing importance of gender as an issue in our society and, even now, gender is a determinate of opportunity. So it is intriguing in itself to deal with an ambitious woman in a tough situation who, on top of personal challenges, has to deal with the distinctive challenges facing a woman who runs for office in which people expect "toughness." But my interest in the subject is much broader. I came to adulthood in the 1960s, so one of the great benefits was having been young when the woman's movement first gained real power. For the first time, men and woman were given the opportunity, even the necessity, of speaking with each other honestly about everything from sex to career to what kind of partnership they expected in marriage to raising children and -- most fundamentally -- to overcoming all the assumptions about gender that their parents raised them with. Certainly, the purpose of the women's movement was not to make me a better writer, but it gave me the chance to rethink the relations between men and women. And if a man can't write, or at least attempt to write, a complex and persuasive woman character, he is not only limited as a writer, he's also limited as a person. I have never believed that you have to be a Jew to write about the Holocaust or African American to write about racial injustice, and to believe that is essentially to believe that we have no hope to improve as people or as a society. I refuse to accept that.
Brady from Nevada: I know that you do pretty extensive research for your books. Where did your research for DARK LADY take you?
Richard North Patterson: All sorts of places: the economics of baseball, the complexities and challenges of being an organized-crime boss, the difficulties of being a woman running for prosecutor in a racially divided city, and, frankly, some of the darker corners of sex. In terms of categories, I talked to women who have run for office, homicide detectives, experts in deviant behavior, people who have put together baseball stadiums, people who have built them, people who have opposed them, and people who gave me a sense of how a corrupt and economically depressed city might really work at various levels. My early reviews have been, to my great pleasure, terrific, and -- aside from compliments about my characters -- I take great pleasure in the comments that my imaginary American city seems as if it really exists. I don't think you can fool readers for long. In the end, they sense whether they are getting an authentic experience or not. That in itself makes the research worthwhile.
Kate from New York: USA Today reports that your new book is on President Clinton's must-read list. Are you friendly with the Clintons?
Richard North Patterson: Yes. First of all, whatever the controversy that surrounds them, I feel that in public policy they have spoken to the best in us, to our more generous impulses rather than our more narrow ones. That is the reason that they have survived the difficulties of their public life. As it happens, the President, who is a voracious reader, reads my books, and he has been nice enough to help me with the research on my latest book that, while free-standing, follows from the events of NO SAFE PLACE. As a writer, I am a nonpartisan, which is to say that although I have deeply held political beliefs, I am an appreciator of quality in people. By any standard, Bill and Hillary Clinton are extraordinary people, I should mention that Laurie and I are very close to George and Barbara Bush, who set an example of grace, dignity, and ability that transcends partisan politics. Other friends I deeply admire are Bill Cohen, the secretary of defense, and John McCain, the war hero and senator from Arizona. Both helped me with my research for NO SAFE PLACE and are valued friends. One of the privileges of being a writer is the opportunity to meet people who have achieved extraordinary things. I am a great admirer of people who live their lives with a purpose and a vision of doing the best they can. My friends in politics certainly are in an extraordinarily demanding business. Finally, for balance, I should add that one of Laurie's cherished new friends is Senator Barbara Boxer, who has often sailed against the tide by being a liberal Democrat in the rather conservative state of California. She, too, has shown tremendous courage and forthrightness. We sometimes wonder what would happen if we had all our Republican and Democratic friends in for dinner, but we admire them all.
Scott from Los Angeles, CA: I understand that your research for NO SAFE PLACE took you on the campaign trail with the Republicans, Bob Dole and the Bushes. How effective did you find the presidential campaign process? What are your biggest observations and criticisms? Who do you expect to win the next election? Who will you vote for?
Richard North Patterson: I finally been asked a question I will chicken out on. For one thing, both George W. Bush and John McCain are friends of mine, and in my cowardly way, I don't way to give away any Democrats either. Fortunately for me, the truth is that I am a registered Independent. My ultimate interest is in seeing both parties put up quality people who speak to the best interests of this country. Just in case you think that I am about to lapse into hopeless bromides, I will give you a stance on where I stand on issues. I admire people of faith, but I think the Christian Right defines our common humanity far too narrowly. I believe in gun control. I believe in gay rights. I believe that we are still a society in which the best deal is to be a white male. As to the political process, until we reform the way we finance political campaigns, especially soft money, I don't think we will be able to make reforms in education, gun control, the explosion of litigation, or many of the other issues we need to address. Finally, I learned a lot from the campaign, but one issue alone comes to mind: the idea that we are excessively dwelling on the personal lives of public figures. There are, for example, respectable arguments on both sides of the current controversy surrounding Governor Bush, but I think that, by drawing a line, he is serving an important interest -- seeking a higher level of civility in politics. For the same reason, I was very grateful that Bill Clinton stood up to the impeachment attack, regardless of how one might feel about the actions that brought it about. The more people are destroyed by personal issues, the nastier our politics will get, and the more good men and women will be driven from public life. I suppose it is easier to write an article about sex and drugs than about Social Security, but we should worry less about the personal lives of politicians and more about political and economic issues.
Moderator: Will you recommend three books that you have read recently and enjoyed?
Richard North Patterson: I am reading ITALIAN FEVER by Valerie Martin. I think she is very talented and has a great eye. People who like big, luxurious novels should try BY LOVE POSSESSED by James Gould Cozzens, a wonderful novel set in the 1950s. I am sure with any luck bn.com can find it for you. The third book I recommend is JUST REVENGE by my friend Alan Dershowitz. It is a moral page-turner about when the Holocuast justifies acts of reprisal, and against whom.
Moderator: Do you have any final comments for the online audience?
Richard North Patterson: Just that this is my tenth book and I feel extraordinarily lucky to have an audience of readers who care about and enjoy what I do. You are the people I am writing for, and I deeply appreciate you.
