Dark Eye

William Bernhardt's Dark Eye is billed as a "provocative thriller," and it certainly delivers on its promise as it leaps into the sordid, brutal world of a Las Vegas serial killer with all of the heart-stopping shock of a Polar Club plunge into icy water. Bernhardt's novel is a work of psychological suspense featuring Susan Pulaski, a tormented, alcoholic cop on the trail of a serial killer who finds "divine inspiration" in the works of Edgar Allan Poe.

Recently widowed and still grieving the loss of her husband, Susan's personal demons threaten to consume her private and professional life. When a drunken bender causes her to mistake the son of a wealthy family for a wanted criminal, her subsequent brutal "arrest" of her "suspect" leads to a brief commitment in a detox center and a pink slip from the Las Vegas police department. Despite her skills as a psychologist and profiler, the police department simply couldn't afford the risk, especially with the boy's family screaming for her head and threatening to sue.

Susan is a complex character, a compelling portrayal of addiction. Self-deluded, argumentative, and often downright unlikable for her deceptions and inability to see the reality of her situation, she is literally a human train wreck careening around Las Vegas looking for trouble. But Bernhardt doesn't pull any punches with his character; he doesn't let Susan off easily or simply let her have a little drinking "problem." Often, alcoholic characters are portrayed in detective fiction in ways which suggest the addiction can be easily shaken or isn't that much of a problem (the idea of the hard-drinking investigator is a frequent image). In Susan Pulaski, we see the often ugly reality of addiction and the destructive seeds it sows. She's caught up in something she can't shake; more, something she doesn't want to shake. When in the middle of another drunken evening she lets some guy in a bar take her out back and essentially assault her, it's not just pathetic and sad; it's also a reflection of her desire to feel "something" in order to feel alive.

When Susan emerges from the detox center still denying any real "problem" with alcohol, she finds that the teenage niece she's had living with her has been put into a foster home. Susan is enraged by this, and in her self-delusion cannot understand why the social services department would find her home an unfit living environment for her niece, Rachel. Her pain, embarrassment, and anger all lead back in a cyclical pattern to the bottle she claims to have forsaken, but can't seem to shake.

Enter the man police come to call "Edgar." He's come to believe that he can usher in some sort of divine transformation by the purification of ritual murder, and his targets are young, disaffected women – something Vegas seems to have in spades. It's fertile ground for his coldly calculating exploits – crimes that shock even the jaded citizens of Sin City. When the first girl is found horrifically "purified" and buried alive, the police know they have a problem on their hands, a problem that only multiplies exponentially as mutilated corpses start turning up all over.

The police department hires Susan back as a "consultant" to help develop profiles of the killer. The police chief isn't certain that Susan's addiction won't still get the better of her, and he has no plans to give her back both a gun and a badge until she proves to the contrary. But "Edgar" proves as elusive as he is insane, an effective killing machine who always seems to stay one step ahead of the police, taunting them with cryptic, coded messages that they can't seem to decipher.

Article Author: W.E. Wallo

W.E. Wallo is a book and movie junkie whose writings have appeared in a variety of print and online publications.

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