The Soul Collectors is the sixth thriller by Chris Mooney, and the fourth featuring CSI Darby McCormick. It also has the distinction of being the first of this author’s books to grace this reviewer’s reading desk. Set largely in Mooney’s native Boston, it follows McCormick’s investigation into a secretive order of kidnappers and torturers, the ‘soul collectors’ alluded to in the title.

From this first experience, Darby McCormick is not an easy heroine to warm to. While, in literature as in life, this reviewer can accept Whitton’s law that a woman must perform twice as well as a man to be thought half as good, McCormick takes physical and mental prowess to a level that sometimes borders on omnipotence. She is at once a skilled hostage-negotiator, an expert in counter-surveillance, a fearsome force in hand-to-hand combat, a fine detective, a stunning beauty and, of course, a fully qualified Crime Scene Investigator. Indeed, she has only two weaknesses, the first being her love for Jackson Cooper, her erstwhile partner at the Boston PD, the second her unfailing desire to assault the credulity of the reader.
In the curtain-raising confrontation, she leads a SWAT team, conducts a hostage negotiation and co-ordinates a city-wide response to a Sarin gas attack (this after taking a shotgun blast directly to the chest), these feats achieved while still looking apt to advertise a new range of hair products. While she may be “worth it”, McCormick may well find in future that to be more plausible, she could stand to be more vulnerable also.
That said, The Soul Collectors is a superbly-crafted thriller, written with a deftness of touch that caused this reviewer not so much to read it as to devour it. From the get-go, the tension is ramped up high and, through a cannily selective feeding of information, maintained to the end.

Much of this selective feeding comes via the fascinating prism of US law enforcement. Armed with an impressive knowledge of their inner workings, Mooney depicts the forces of justice not as dry monoliths, but breathing entities, bristling with alpha-males and suffused with machismo. The politics that are logically attendant to this atmosphere are the more interesting because of it; scarcely an interaction goes by between law enforcement agencies without some form of power struggle. While not necessarily a commentary on the subject, The Soul Collectors offers an enlightening view on the motivations of those charged with protecting their fellow man.

The antagonists in the novel exist for the most part on the edge of the plot, surfacing for a few brief pages at a time to horrify the reader, pulling them into the darkness of the psyche. The world inhabited by the antagonists is harrowing, being as it is one geared towards physical, mental and emotional torture. The violence employed in this world is reminiscent of that of Clive Barker‘s Cenobites, and also borrows a certain facial accoutrement from the casebook of real life murderer Ed Gein. That Mooney manages to draw on these sources for inspiration without being gratuitous is to be lauded. Nevertheless, the more faint of heart may wish to consider some milder reading material.

For those with the constitution for it, particularly crime and thriller fans, The Soul Collectors is recommended. The plot moves at a swift but always engaging pace, the detail is deep without over-indulging pedants among the readership, and the human drama is arresting throughout. Though unlikely to topple the giants of a crowded genre on the strength of this work alone, Mooney shows himself to be a fine writer and a deserving Edgar Award nominee.

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