FW Armstrong has appeared here once before with The Changing. Armstrong is a pen name for the usually very good indeed TM Wright. However, i recall finding the Changing to be greatly lacking, and sadly this is not much of an improvement.
Shortly after he failed entirely to save any lives in the Changing, our psychic detective Ryerson Biergarten gets mixed up in what starts out as apparent vampire attacks in the town of Buffalo. He also finds love with a fellow psychic and must save her somehow from the evil spreading through the town.
While I say this isn't much of an improvement on the Changing, it is an improvement. It's a very different take on the vampire story initially and morphs into something quite different by the ending.
However, he completely drops the ball on the ending and I have no real idea of how or why the evil was apparently stopped... there are major plot threads left hanging and not resolved.
It's difficult to take bits of this book seriously with character names like Irene Sabitch scattered around. There are almost no normal names in the entire book and it becomes distracting.
Saying this, it's not all bad. It's just a weak book by Wright's standards. The writing doesn't have his usual compelling draw but it's more than competently written. The concepts being played with are really quite disturbing. Although there is a major plotline left dangling, the final confrontation with Ryerson and the Big Bad is actually really tense and a genuinely good piece of horror writing.
Ryerson appears in two books under Wright's real name (Goodlow's Ghosts and Ascension), and is a much better character in those.
This is probably a book best suited for TM Wright completists.
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