Shyla Sinclair is a private investigator dabbling in the supernatural. Her last client was a rich man convinced he was the Antichrist who’s now disappeared off the map. When another billionaire, Saxton Braith, contacts her for help, she’s got a good handle on how to play it: humor him, make no promises, and get paid upfront. All that goes out the window when Braith puts a fire poker through his own skull.
It doesn’t kill him. Nothing can, as far as Braith knows. He wants Shyla to figure out why.
Thoroughly rattled, Shyla starts with the earliest public facts about Braith: that, in the 50s, he survived a plane crash that killed his fellow pilot. Her investigation leads her to the Inspiration Sweet Hotel in San Antonio, and to the attention of her psychic ex-girlfriend Jinh, who begins receiving strange visions and dreams that Shyla’s walking into danger. Those visions come true when Shyla and Jinh, investigating a hidden room beneath the bar, are nearly consumed by hungry ghosts looking to prey on Shyla’s dark secret—the same secret that drove her and Jinh apart.
This backstory comes in bits and pieces, but soon enough we learn that Shyla’s killed someone, and that she’s hoping to kill again. She was stolen out of the hospital as an infant, raised by her abductors Rodney and Linda; as a teenager, she finally put the pieces together about why Rodney and Linda didn’t look anything like her, why they kept moving every three years. Once she learned her birth mother had died after confronting her “parents,” she killed Rodney, and she felt good about it. Linda disappeared, and Shyla still craves being the one to put a bullet in her skull.
The truth of Shyla’s abduction (but not her murder) made Shyla moderately famous, connected her with Jinh and her paranormal podcast. But then, once she and Jinh had grown close, Jinh had a vision of Shyla’s mother, dead in a crashed car beneath a bridge. It’d been an accident, one neither Rodney nor Linda had anything to do with. Shyla’s neat, vengeful story couldn’t hold.
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Dead First
Dead First’s blend of genres, mystery with horror, means it has to walk a fine line between the grounded and the supernatural. Mysteries require a clear, physical chain of evidence, walking readers from one step to the next. Even if everything’s shrouded in eerie mystique, it has to come back down to earth. Horrors, on the other hand, thrive in the liminal in-between, where terror and revenge exert real pressure on the world and intangible curses thrive; nailing them down to be concrete can often strip away what makes them scary in the first place. Yet Dead First is strongest when it manages to do just that.
One of the most chilling scenes of the book comes after Shyla finally meets Braith’s enemies, the twins who call him a murderer and impostor, who want nothing more than to break his immortality and finally get their revenge. Given that they nearly kill Shyla herself, she’s not happy with being kept in the dark, and she drags Braith into the nearby police history museum to get the truth from him.
Instead, he gets the truth from her.
It’s a simple thing he uses: a tea, mixed with a few drops of blood, specks of grave soil, and “select fluids from different lizards.” Don’t worry about that last one. Combined, they make a truth serum, a physical compulsion chipping away at Shyla’s mind to give up all those lies and deceptions. No matter that Braith tells her, in his smug-sweet way, exactly what he’s done and how it works, no matter how much Shyla wants to keep her own secrets or fights its tendrils in her mind, she’s on the wrong side of the serum.
That’s a kind of horror I find frightening: The idea that sometimes the rules are simply against you, that there’s no way out not because of any failure, or fuckup, or divine punishment, but simply because that’s not how the world works. And it’s fitting, too, for a book about a private investigator tangling with a billionaire, trudging into the world of payoffs and bribes where the rules of society start to bend. Call it a sort of modern noir, following in the spiritual footsteps of dark alleys, corrupt cops, and money paving over all evils, all under the blazing sun and storms of south Texas.
Not all of Dead First’s character work is quite as compelling. Shyla’s motives can get confusing, stuck in a cycle of revenge-but-not-quite-for-the-reasons-she-thought-it-was:. It’s hard to see how knowing the truth about her mother changes her opinion of Rodney and Linda, or even if it should. And it may be personal taste, but I was frustrated at the way Remy—Braith’s sharp, no-nonsense bodyguard—was treated by the story. I love a good hard-bitten woman; they’re one of my favorite character archetypes to read about. But after proving her credentials, Remy spends the rest of the book getting tossed around and captured by whoever’s the present antagonist. This might be a book filled with tough women, but it was still a bit disappointing.
Perhaps it’s because, in the end, the focus of Dead First isn’t the characters. It’s the atmosphere, the slow dread, the feeling of untouchable curses from decades ago. That’s where the book draws its title from: Braith, immortal and loving it, doesn’t think of people in terms of relationships, personalities, names, or appearances. To him, they are all dead first. And perhaps, if you wander into the wrong hotel or bar somewhere between San Antonio and Galveston, you might be, too…
Dead First is published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons.
