Sol Dearday has been a jobbing private investigator for most of his working life. At the age of forty-one, he realizes that this has been mere preparation for his main case: an investigation into himself, into how a single devastating event in childhood has shaped his adult life. A chance encounter takes him to a small town, in search of a father he has not spoken to in thirty years. While Hunting in the Dark draws on the style and conventions of genre fiction, its locus is literary, exploring themes of memory and identity. For Sol, fragments of the past percolate through the present, offering glimpses that he cannot reconcile into a coherent whole. After nine turbulent days in the town, during which he touches the lives of other troubled and damaged people, the novel is brought to a climax when Sol has a revelation that turns the understanding of his life upside down...