The Dark Dawn – review

Author: Jerry Knaak

First Published: 2022

Contains spoilers

The Blurb: San Francisco 1943

After an injury saved him from the hell of World War II, Jonas Dietrich is on the verge of becoming the youngest detective in the history of the San Francisco Police Department. He is a husband and a father, who adores his family.

But there is more than fog on the wind in The City. An ancient evil has taken root. A violent predator the likes of which the residents, and police, of San Francisco have never seen embarks on a reign of terror that holds The City in a grip of deadly fear.

Our intrepid police sergeant and his compatriots band together to fight this dreadful new enemy, all the while forgetting to tend to the home fires.

The fourth instalment in The Dark Passage Series will introduce you to evil and depravity like no other in this prequel to The Dark Truth.

The review: As the blurb suggests, this is the fourth volume in the Dark Passage Series (you can read my review of book three, which links to reviews of the first two volumes) but this is a prequel rather than a continuation of the series.

I found the change refreshing. The primary character of the previous books, Elizabeth Rubis, became ever more powerful in each volume; logical, in the series, but the threat also had to grow to create a tension. In this we follow Jonas Dietrich who, in the previous books, is a vampire who hunts evil vampires and instead find a human facing terrifying odds with initially little or no knowledge to help that fight. This switch up changes the feel of the book as does the fact that we are in the realm of police procedural as the newly minted detective Dietrich works his first case, which at first seems to be a sadistic and ritualistic killer but quickly takes a turn towards the occult (as the killer is, of course, a vampire).

Knaak does a good job at immersing us in a bygone San Francisco though there are some quibbles. For a character drawn as a sharp, intuitive copper, the fact that Dietrich misses a peril closer to home felt just that bit off and I think the author could have closed that gap with a little more detail explaining why he was blind-spotting there (I read that in myself, as I read, but it would have been good for the book to guide us there a little more). That said there is a pace to this and I enjoyed the journey. If you are a fan of the series then the book will offer you a nice solid piece of background to the Dietrich character. 7 out of 10.

In Paperback @ Amazon US

In Paperback @ Amazon UK