The Root of All Evil

Does the devil live? Can he take over a man's life, passing down his powers from father to son? Farrow's answer in this novel--more horror than mystery--is an overblown yes. Three Charleston, S.C., childhood buddies assembled at the funeral of a fourth in 1997 seem only mildly interested in the police investigation of the most recent in a series of tourist murders. Meanwhile, black police lieutenant Harry Holmes recognizes a clue left at each scene: a scraggly root that represents a fatal curse in a voodoo-like religion practiced by local island inhabitants. As Holmes investigates the murders, he pinpoints local white author and tour guide Andrew Rutledge as the likely killer. Rutledge, whose history of misfortune includes the deaths of his wife and children, has been having bizarre hallucinatory experiences in which he enters the bodies of female murder victims. An extended flashback informs readers about root medicine in the coastal Carolinas and recounts a particular stormy night nearly 30 years earlier on which the devil's power was transferred from a father to his son, who is one of Rutledge's friends. Rutledge begins to identify the source of evil and attempts to destroy the evil one before he himself is caught by Holmes. Gradually, Farrow's routine police procedural becomes a sludgy polemic on demonic possession, a progression that will disappoint many mystery readers. (May)