Daniel Cauterucci’s twisty crime thriller GABRIEL’S LABYRINTH: In the Midst of Darkness is reminiscent, initially at least, of Don Winslow’s hardboiled novels of the drug trade. Gabriel Durán, a captain in the Miami drug cartel, is a loyal soldier who ably—if sometimes reluctantly— carries out the deadly orders of his ruthless boss while eluding the clutches of a team of DEA agents hellbent on taking him down. When his young son is gravely injured in an accident, a desperate Gabriel strikes a bargain with God: My life for his. That’s the deal. It’s a bargain he will soon have to contend with in a way he could not have anticipated.
GABRIEL’S LABYRINTH is a raw and surprisingly contemplative novel that drops the reader into a criminal underworld rendered with journalistic detail and more depth and complexity than the crime genre typically delivers. Characters that often function solely as paper-thin pawns to drive the plot forward—Ricky, the corrupt cop Gabriel viciously interrogates, for instance, or Gabriel’s disaffected wife, Sofía—are given interiority and personality, while Gabriel’s brutal nature is explored via flashbacks to his abusive childhood. The reader is never allowed to forget these characters’ humanity. It’s a humane and empathetic storytelling approach that seems out of place in such a grim, bloody tale—until the novel unexpectedly swerves from gritty realism into a very different mode. In a plot turn that may either delight or frustrate readers anticipating a straightforward chronicle of Miami’s criminal underbelly, GABRIEL’S LABYRINTH takes on a supernatural dimension more suggestive of Highway to Heaven than Miami Vice. Once the identity and purpose of the Hooded Man, an enigmatic figure who shadows Gabriel’s every move, is revealed, the story gains a beguiling spiritual element but loses much of the grounded realism that makes the novel so compelling.
This genre-bending shift towards the fantastical balances the novel on something of a tonal tightrope, lending Gabriel’s story a strand of optimism and reluctant compassion without tipping it over into sentimentality. That the book ultimately pulls off this balancing act is a testament to Cauterucci’s storytelling prowess. There is much to admire about GABRIEL’S LABYRINTH: its complex, nonlinear narrative skips back and forth across vast swaths of time while remaining perfectly coherent; and aside from a few crowded passages that could have benefited from tighter editing, the story moves along at a brisk pace while taking the time to properly develop its characters. Cauterucci, who, according to his author bio, was raised in Central America, includes a glossary of Spanish slang phrases, and it’s one of the book’s highlights. Not only does it allow the author to get on with his story without stopping to translate for non-Spanish-speaking readers or compromising realism by having characters code-switch for readers’ benefit, but the glossary stands on its own as an exhaustive compendium of Spanish language profanity.
GABRIEL’S LABYRINTH: In the Midst of Darkness is a ferocious debut by Daniel Cauterucci, whose supernatural spin on the drug cartel thriller is sure to captivate fans of both crime and dark fantasy.
~Edward Sung for IndieReader