I was so impressed with the first in Barbara Nickless’s Dr. Evan Wilding series At First Light that I immediately ordered the second in the series, Dark of Night. Author Nickless demonstrates great plotting, fascinating historical references, little-known trivial tidbits, and intriguing characters. I adore the main character, Evan Wilding, Ph.D., an intelligent professor who is a four-foot, five-inch tall dwarf. He overcompensates for his height with a brain that is as delightful as it is immense. He is a tenured college professor who moonlights for the Chicago Police Department as a forensic semiotician, an expert in the study of signs and symbols and their use or interpretation.
When a corpse is found in a parking lot in a run-down area of Chicago, it is identified as noted historian Elizabeth Lawrence, a friend of Wilding’s as well as a great-niece of T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia). Wilding joins Detective Addie Bisset and her partner Detective Patrick McBrady as well as a member of Israel’s Mossad to solve the crime. As the corpses add up, they realize they are facing a killer with a religious obsession. To find him, the team must shift through legitimate as well as illegitimate purchases and purchasers of archeological finds from Israel, Cambodia, and Jordan while searching for the missing papyri of Moses.
Dark of Night, like At First Light, incorporates many subjects I find fascinating. I’ve been entranced with T. E. Lawrence since seeing David Lean’s fabulous movie, Lawrence of Arabia, when I was ten years old. I’ve read Lawrence’s own book, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and Robert Graves’s (of I, Claudius fame) Lawrence and the Arabs. I’ve also been on archeological digs, though searching for Native American artifacts, not missing tracts of the Bible. My favorite thrillers are the Gabriel Allon series written by Daniel Silva, and the Dr. Evan Wilding series has all the sophistication of a Silva novel. I plan to continue reading them as they are written.
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Dark of Night (Thomas & Mercer, November 15, 2022) is available through:
At First Light (Thomas & Mercer, December 1, 2021) is available through:
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You can read my review of At First Light here.
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