Hard Light
Elizabeth Hand

‘Elizabeth Hand’s Cass Neary novels, rightly praised for their icy tension and remarkable darkness, are threaded, like the best of punk in any medium, on a bloodied yet admirably stubborn humanism.’
– William Gibson

‘As a huge mystery and noir buff, I love Elizabeth Hand’s Cass Neary novels―they’re tough-minded, beautifully written, and unique. One of the best series out there. In Hard Light, Hand has created another fascinating puzzle―and another instant classic. If you’re a fan of intelligent page-turners, this one’s for you.’
– Jeff Vandermeer

‘Elizabeth Hand’s Hard Light is a pitch-perfect punk noir that makes a speed-fueled, mad-dash tour through an avant garde underbelly London and the lost landscape of rural England. It’s about the lost, the heartbreakingly ephemeral, and the melancholy timelessness of art and love and murder. It’s a tour de force. It’s a great goddamn book. If you haven’t met Cass Neary yet, do so before you get a well-deserved steel-toe to the knee.’
– Paul Tremblay

Strobe-lit against an apocalyptic background of rock and roll, rave culture, fast drugs, and transgressive photography, Hard Light continues the breathless, breathtaking saga of Cassandra Neary in the series that began with Generation Loss and Available Dark.

Fleeing Reykjavik and a cluster of cult murders, Cass lands in London to rendezvous with her longtime lover Quinn, a person of interest to both Interpol and the Russian mob.

Only Quinn doesn’t show up. Alone in London and fearing the worst, Cass hooks up with a singer-songwriter with her own dark past, who brings her to the wrong party. Cass becomes entangled with the party’s host, Mallo Tierney, an eccentric gangster with a penchant for cigar cutters and neatly-wrapped packages, and a trio of dissolute groupies connected to a notorious underground filmmaker.

Forced to run Mallo’s contraband, Cass is suddenly enmeshed in a web of murder, betrayal, and artistic and sexual obsession that extends from London to the stark beauty of Land’s End , where she uncovers an archaeological enigma that could change our view of human history―if she survives.

Praise for Hard Light

‘Hand’s supernaturally inflected Cass Neary crime novels make mincemeat out of the assumption—still held by many an unwary reader—that mysteries are mere diversions, designed to pass an empty hour and then be forgotten. No way that’s true of Hard Light: This third novel in the Cass Neary series fades away as stubbornly as a bloodstain.’
– The Washington Post

About the Author

Elizabeth Hand is the author of twenty multiple-award-winning novels and five collections of short fiction.  Her most recent book, A Haunting on the Hill, was named one of 2023’s best novels by the Washington Post, The New Yorker, and Harper’s Bazaar.  She’s been a longtime contributor of book reviews to the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and the Boston Review, among many others.  Her acclaimed novels featuring Cass Neary, “one of noir’s great antiheroes" [Katherine Dunn, author of Geek Love] have been translated into multiple languages, and are being developed for a major television series.  She divides her time between the last of Maine and North London.

Paperback ISBN: 9781914391361

Ebook ISBN: 9781914391378

Publication date: October 2024

Formats: Paperback / eBook