Dashiell Hammett, a master of big city crime fiction, would have enjoyed Richard North Patterson's latest thriller, set in a fictional Midwestern city called Steelton. This burnt-out burg is located on the shores of Lake Erie--and is a place bitterly divided by politics. The construction of a $275 million baseball stadium threatens to be Steelton's downfall rather than its redemption.

Arthur Bright is the prosecutor of Erie County, but he wants to become mayor. His campaign attacks the new ballpark as a boondoggle, "a shameful diversion of public financing from such pressing needs as better schools, better housing, and safer streets." His protégé, Assistant County Prosecutor Stella Marz is 38, ambitious, and has been dubbed "the dark lady" by various defense lawyers. If Arthur wins the mayoral race, she intends to become prosecutor herself. But two murders involving drugs and twisted sex threaten her future.

First, Tommy Fielding, the project manager for Steelton 2000 (as the new home of the Steelton Blues will be called), is found dead in the company of a hooker--both apparently having overdosed on heroin. The fact that Fielding was gay and had never used drugs before bothers Stella and Chief Detective Nathaniel Dance. Their worries are soon pushed aside by another, more shocking murder--Jack Novak, a defense lawyer, is discovered hanging from his closet door, castrated and dressed in drag. Jack was once Stella's lover--and he was also one of Bright's largest contributors. For Stella, the murders are too close to home. "Maybe this is about me. But I have to see it through."

Dark Lady is shrouded by the dark clouds of deceit and greed, and the sleek structure of Steelton 2000 dominates the landscape like a Dr. Frankenstein's Castle with luxury boxes. --Dick Adler

From Publishers Weekly
Patterson (Degree of Guilt; No Safe Place) has advanced considerably from his earlier, rather glib commercial thrillers. His world now seems much more somber, his characters more ridden with real-world angst; only a tendency to melodramatic flourishes and a certain narrative slickness suggest the pop writer he once was. His setting this time is Steelton, a grim Midwestern city on a lake that went into the dumps when its steel mills folded, and whose ambitious mayor wants to help revive it with an expensive sports stadium. The stadium seems to be good for the city and its suffering minority workers, but who really stands to gain? And what role does the shadowy mafia capo who runs the city's drug trade play in the proceedings? What about the plucky black mayoral candidate who sees the stadium as a rip-off by which the rich get richer? Against this highly detailed and well-observed background, Patterson introduces Stella Marz, chief of homicide in the local prosecutor's office, and a woman not without her own ambitions. She has personal demons to overcome: a wretchedly unhappy childhood, an unwise affair in her youth with a flashy lawyer who became the drug king's mouthpiece. Now the lawyer, and one of the top execs in the stadium company, have been found dead, in bizarre circumstances that suggest they both lived exotic secret lives. It is Stella's job, with the aid of a police chief whose motives she never quite grasps, to sort all this out. Patterson has devised a fiendishly complex plot combining financial shenanigans in high places, police corruption, political pressures and, ultimately threats, to Stella's sanity and life, all resolved in a High Noon-style windup that leaves Steelton and Stella only slightly better off than they began. Patterson's attempt to go beyond commercial formulas to create real, contemporary American drama is admirable, but somewhat undermined by, for example, a reader's realization that a character with an adorable small daughter cannot, in the nature of Patterson's fiction, be a villain. Literary Guild main selection; Random audio and large print editions. (Aug.) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Patterson (No Safe Place) deftly combines his knack for spellbinding legal drama and his recent interest in the world of politics. Stella Marz is the assistant county prosecutor in a struggling Midwestern city. Her boss is running for mayor, and Stella hopes to be elected to his job. First, however, she must investigate the deaths of two prominent menAthe project manager for the construction of a new baseball stadium and the city's leading defender of drug cases. Neither is clearly murder, but the circumstances are horrific and unusual, involving heroin and kinky sex. Stella's investigation quickly becomes a factor in the mayoral race, and the candidates, their backers, and other ambitious county employees all play roles in Stella's progress. The deeper she goes, the more signs of corruption she finds, and the less she can trust her friends, her co-workers, and even herself. As in all of Patterson's books, the plot's twists and turns build to an unexpected conclusion. Patterson has peopled this very believable novel with fascinating characters, and his understanding of political subtleties is superb. Highly recommended. [Literary Guild main selection.]AKatherine E.A. Sorci, IIT Research Inst., Annapolis, M.-AKatherine E.A. Sorci, IIT Research Inst., Annapolis, MD Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Set in Steelton, a city that sounds like Cleveland before it

From Kirkus Reviews
Patterson, always on the lookout for real-life issues to hang his big-ticket thrillers on, has found another onealmostin the hotly contested new baseball stadium to be built in Pittsburgh with public financing. It's clear from the beginning that the new stadium defines the mayoral race in Steelton, Patterson's fictionalized Pittsburgh. Incumbent mayor Tom Krajek flourishes figures about minority contractors and visions of civic revitalization to rally support for Steelton 2000; his opponent, Erie County prosecutor Arthur Bright, ridicules Steelton 2000 as welfare for the richespecially for Peter Hall, the dynastic principal owner of the Blues. And it's almost equally clear that the stadium is connected in some way to the unsavory deaths of Tommy Fielding, project supervisor for Steelton 2000, and nonpareil drug attorney Jack Novak. What's not clear is just what the connection is. Enter Stella Marz, the Dark Lady of Arthur Bright's homicide unit, who hopes to run for prosecutor herself if Arthur's mayoral bid succeedsand if her unit can find the people responsible for these latest high-profile murders. But Stella's two goals are hopelessly at odds. Her ability to gather information linking Tommy, well-protected by City Hall and that other Hall, and Jack, her ex-boss and ex-lover, to legendary crime overlord Vincent Moro is constantly undermined by her former ties to Jack, whom she left when she realized how nasty his sexual proclivities were, and her current ties to Arthur. Meantime, she can't trust any of her likeliest allies, from Arthur to doughty Chief of Detectives Nathaniel Dance to Michael Del Corso, the whiz-kid county attorney who knows too much about Steelton 2000 for comfortor perhaps for romance. Dense, knotty, and earnest, though the monstrous stadium isn't quite the high-concept hook Patterson (No Safe Place, 1998, etc.) would need to pull it all together. What he offers instead is a familiar brew of kinky sex, political fixes, and twenty channels of nonstop Vincent Moro. (Literary Guild main selection) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review
"ENGROSSING . . . TRUE SUSPENSE."
--San Francisco Chronicle

"[A] COMPLEX TALE OF PERSONAL, POLITICAL, AND CRIMINAL BETRAYALS . . . Dark Lady not only keeps you in suspense; it gives you plenty of social and moral questions to ponder."
--The Wall Street Journal

"EXCELLENT . . . ONCE AGAIN PATTERSON REVEALS HIMSELF TO BE A MASTER OF CRAFTING MEMORABLE CHARACTERS. AND THE LONELY, LOVELY STELLA MARZ . . . IS ONE OF HIS BEST."
--USA Today


From the Paperback edition.

Review
"ENGROSSING . . . TRUE SUSPENSE."
--San Francisco Chronicle

"[A] COMPLEX TALE OF PERSONAL, POLITICAL, AND CRIMINAL BETRAYALS . . . Dark Lady not only keeps you in suspense; it gives you plenty of social and moral questions to ponder."
--The Wall Street Journal

"EXCELLENT . . . ONCE AGAIN PATTERSON REVEALS HIMSELF TO BE A MASTER OF CRAFTING MEMORABLE CHARACTERS. AND THE LONELY, LOVELY STELLA MARZ . . . IS ONE OF HIS BEST."
--USA Today


From the Paperback edition.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
Two very different figures dominate the landscape of Richard North Patterson's latest — and grimmest — political/legal thriller, Dark Lady. One is Stella Marz, an ambitious, driven deputy prosecutor with a troubled past, an unsatisfactory personal life, and nascent political aspirations. The other — itself virtually a character in the novel — is the fictional city of Steelton, an emblematic American community with a full complement of contemporary social ills: crime, drug abuse, racial tensions, economic difficulties, and deep-seated, endemic corruption.

As the novel opens, Steelton is in the midst of an election year. Stella, the Dark Lady of the title, is hoping to use her pristine professional record — she has not lost a case in more than six years — to transform herself into a viable candidate for chief prosecutor of Erie County. To succeed — to become the first female prosecutor in the county's history — she must secure the support of current Chief Prosecutor Arthur Bright, who is himself hoping to become the first black mayor in the city's history, and who is waging an uphill campaign against a solidly entrenched incumbent, Thomas Krajek.

The central issue of the mayoral campaign — the issue around which virtually everything that happens in this novel ultimately revolves — concerns the construction of a $275 million baseball stadium, a project that is universally referred to as "Steelton 2000." The issue that divides the candidates is fundamental. Is Steelton 2000, as Krajek claims, the tangible symbol of a new erainSteelton history, a source of jobs, taxes, and economic opportunities? Or does it represent another kind of symbol: of greed, profiteering, and political and corporate malfeasance? Stella herself wants very much to believe that the new stadium will provide the key to the revitalization of Steelton. Unfortunately, her investigation into a pair of seemingly unrelated murders — murders that stand at the heart of Dark Lady's convoluted plot — leads her to an inescapable conclusion: that the entire project has been compromised by the corrupt ambitions of its own central supporters.

The first of the two murder victims is Tommy Fielding, project manager for Steelton 2000. Fielding, together with a prostitute and long-term drug addict named Tina Welsh, is found dead of a massive heroin overdose. The circumstances of his death are so radically out of character that no one who knew him can accept them at face value. The second murder victim is Jack Novak, a lawyer who built a lucrative career defending the interests of Steelton's leading drug dealers. Novak — who, many years before, had been Stella Marz's lover — is found castrated and hanging from a clothes hook in his own bedroom, in a grotesque parody of the rituals of autoerotic asphyxiation.

Stella's investigation reveals unexpected connections between these two deaths. As she unearths the details of Jack Novak's corrupt, increasingly decadent career — a process that revives some painful personal memories of her own — she follows a convoluted paper trail that leads, in time, from Jack Novak to Steelton 2000, and from Steelton 2000 to the shadowy domain of Vincent Moro, who has dominated the criminal underworld of Steelton for more than a generation. Along the way, she uncovers another series of unexpected connections that implicate a number of the city's leading citizens, all of whom are caught up, willingly or not, in an elaborate, long-term scheme that centers around a single enormous question: Who will control the economic future of Steelton?

Patterson, it must be said, is not an elegant stylist. He writes what might be termed a lawyer's prose: brisk, efficient, frequently lacking in subtlety or nuance. But there is a cumulative, Dreiser-like power in this novel that is difficult to ignore, a power that has its basis in Patterson's thorough, practical understanding of the machinery of urban politics; in his detailed, highly convincing sense of place; and in his clear-eyed view of the various temptations — sexual, financial, political — that complicate the lives of so many of his characters. The result is a novel that gradually, inexorably asserts its hold on us and leaves a bitter but unmistakable aftertaste behind.

—Bill Sheehan

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In Dark Lady, Richard North Patterson displays the mastery of setting, psychology, and story that makes him unique among writers of suspense, and one of today's most original and enthralling novelists.
In Steelton, a struggling Midwestern city on the cusp of an economic turnaround, two prominent men are found dead within days of each other. One is Tommy Fielding, a senior officer of the company building a new baseball stadium, the city's hope for the future. The other is Jack Novak, the local drug dealers' attorney of choice. Fielding's death with a prostitute, from an overdose of heroin, seems accidental; Novak is apparently the victim of a ritual murder. But in each case the character of the dead man seems contradicted by the particulars of his death. Coincidence or connection?
The question falls to Assistant County Prosecutor Stella Marz. Despite a traumatic breach with her alcoholic and embittered father, she has risen from a working-class background to become head of the prosecutor's homicide unit. A driven woman, she is called the Dark Lady by defense lawyers for her relentless, sometimes ruthless, style: in seven years only one case has gotten away from her, and only because the defendant took his own life. She has earned every inch of both her official and her off-the-record titles, and recently she's decided to go after another: to become the first woman elected Prosecutor of Erie County. But that was before the brutal murder of her ex-lover--Jack Novak.
Novak's death leads her into a labyrinth where her personal and professional lives become dangerously intertwined. There is the possibility that Novak fixed drug cases for the city's crime lord, Vincent Moro,with the help of law enforcement personnel, and perhaps with someone in Stella's own office . . . the bitter mayoral race which threatens to undermine her own ambitions . . . her attraction to a colleague who may not be what he seems . . . the lingering, complicated effects of her painful affair with Novak . . . the growing certainty that she is being watched and followed. Making her way through a maze of corruption, deceit, and greed, trusting no one, Stella comes to believe that the search for the truth involves the bleak history of Steelton itself--a history that now endangers her future, and perhaps her life.
For his uncanny dialogue, subtle delineation of character, and hypnotic narrative, critics have compared Richard North Patterson to John O'Hara and Dashiell Hammett. Now, in the character of the Dark Lady, he has created a woman as fascinating as her world is haunting. Dark Lady is his signature work.
From the Hardcover edition.

Author Biography: Richard North Patterson studied fiction writing with Jesse Hill Ford at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He has written ten novels, including the international bestsellers Degree of Guilt, Eyes of a Child, The Final Judgment, Silent Witness, and No Safe Place. Patterson lives with his wife, Laurie, and their family in San Francisco and on Martha's Vineyard.
From the Paperback edition.

FROM THE CRITICS

Deirdre Donahue - USA Today

Stella makes Dark Lady shine.

Publishers Weekly

Patterson's signature style of crime suspense depends heavily on the terse descriptive passages he uses to render settings and characters. This makes his work adapt especially well to audio, since the listener is constantly being told exactly what's going on--in adjective-laden language that has modern-day colorings of film noir and Raymond Chandler. (Accordingly, all eight of Patterson's previous novels are also available from Random House AudioBooks). Stella Marz is a politically ambitious Assistant County Prosecutor in Steelton, an American rust-belt city plagued by unemployment, racial division and rampant local corruption. Young, beautiful and forthright, Stella has earned the nickname "Dark Lady" as a ruthless law-woman. But she meets her match when she's assigned to investigate the grisly murder of her own ex-lover, an attorney for the town's drug dealers. Along the way, plenty of sordid sexual and violent acts are detailed, making for a sustained mood of grimy titillation. Kalember's (of TV's Sisters and thirtysomething) reading is crisply enunciated and tactfully understated. Simultaneous release with the Knopf hardcover. Also available unabridged and on CD. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Patterson (No Safe Place) deftly combines his knack for spellbinding legal drama and his recent interest in the world of politics. Stella Marz is the assistant county prosecutor in a struggling Midwestern city. Her boss is running for mayor, and Stella hopes to be elected to his job. First, however, she must investigate the deaths of two prominent men--the project manager for the construction of a new baseball stadium and the city's leading defender of drug cases. Neither is clearly murder, but the circumstances are horrific and unusual, involving heroin and kinky sex. Stella's investigation quickly becomes a factor in the mayoral race, and the candidates, their backers, and other ambitious county employees all play roles in Stella's progress. The deeper she goes, the more signs of corruption she finds, and the less she can trust her friends, her co-workers, and even herself. As in all of Patterson's books, the plot's twists and turns build to an unexpected conclusion. Patterson has peopled this very believable novel with fascinating characters, and his understanding of political subtleties is superb. Highly recommended. [Literary Guild main selection.]--Katherine E.A. Sorci, IIT Research Inst., Annapolis, MD Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Entertainment Weekly - September 3, 1999

Kinky sex, multiple murders, soap opera, city politics—a sturdy frame, as good and as potentially dramatic as anything Patterson has given us before. Yet once the premise and all of the players are in position, things turn clunky, then fall apart. Bad enough that the prose is cliched and the dialogue flavorless, but you quickly get a sinking feeling that the author is just going through the motions, narrating without any passion for his material, or even much interest. And heck, if he doesn't believe what he's saying, why should we?...

Give Patterson this: Despite all the tired hookum this time, and a finale that lumbers along for nearly a hundred pages, he doesn't fudge when it comes to his novel's undergirding facts. Dark Lady is at its best during its frequent, if long-winded, tutorials on the poli-sci of stadium building. But that's not enough to keep those of us outside the construction industry glued to the page.

Kirkus Reviews

Patterson, always on the lookout for real-life issues to hang his big-ticket thrillers on, has found another one￯﾿ﾽalmost￯﾿ﾽin the hotly contested new baseball stadium to be built in Pittsburgh with public financing. It's clear from the beginning that the new stadium defines the mayoral race in Steelton, Patterson's fictionalized Pittsburgh. Incumbent mayor Tom Krajek flourishes figures about minority contractors and visions of civic revitalization to rally support for Steelton 2000; his opponent, Erie County prosecutor Arthur Bright, ridicules Steelton 2000 as welfare for the rich￯﾿ﾽespecially for Peter Hall, the dynastic principal owner of the Blues. And it's almost equally clear that the stadium is connected in some way to the unsavory deaths of Tommy Fielding, project supervisor for Steelton 2000, and nonpareil drug attorney Jack Novak. What's not clear is just what the connection is. Enter Stella Marz, the Dark Lady of Arthur Bright's homicide unit, who hopes to run for prosecutor herself if Arthur's mayoral bid succeeds￯﾿ﾽand if her unit can find the people responsible for these latest high-profile murders. But Stella's two goals are hopelessly at odds. Her ability to gather information linking Tommy, well-protected by City Hall and that other Hall, and Jack, her ex-boss and ex-lover, to legendary crime overlord Vincent Moro is constantly undermined by her former ties to Jack, whom she left when she realized how nasty his sexual proclivities were, and her current ties to Arthur. Meantime, she can't trust any of her likeliest allies, from Arthur to doughty Chief of Detectives Nathaniel Dance to Michael Del Corso, the whiz-kid county attorney who knows too much about Steelton 2000 forcomfort￯﾿ﾽor perhaps for romance. Dense, knotty, and earnest, though the monstrous stadium isn't quite the high-concept hook Patterson (No Safe Place, 1998, etc.) would need to pull it all together. What he offers instead is a familiar brew of kinky sex, political fixes, and twenty channels of nonstop Vincent Moro. (Literary Guild main selection)