Richard Aleas has gotten to the heart of the matter when looking at suicide and murder. He takes John Blake into dark places and rough areas in search of an ultimate end of life, all the while carrying the reader into the depths of sorrow and searching for answers. John is a young “retired” detective who has taken a position at a local college to keep busy while his mind repairs the problems of a failed attempt at love and murder and much self-recrimination. A very close friend of his, Dorrie Burke, a young college student who has a double life, has found out some things in her quest for finding her father that even John Blake didn't know, (though he supplied the man's name to Dorrie as a favor), and this has led Dorrie into unfathomable depths of despair and self-hatred. This is a fast moving book that deals with a few stories all at once, one being the seamier side of life in the New York Sex trades, and the other, the stark realization of what has caused the destruction of a marriage and the alienation of a father and the realization that young, beautiful Dorrie had nothing to live for. But was she murdered for her knowledge of those very sex trades that she took part in, or did she take the ultimate way out? Did someone do it for her, or was the pain inside of her mind so great that she just couldn't go on anymore? Blake has to find out. And while doing this, he comes into contact with, and in the middle of, several other murders and attempts at murder that didn't go as planned in the battles of the forces of the Sex Industry that many cities, not just New York , have.

Songs of Innocence is very fast paced and intense in places, because of the subject matter and the depth that Aleas goes into in his character development. However, I found it to be a gripping read and would recommend it to anyone who likes to look deeper into things that seem OK on the surface and take a chance to poke around a bit, only to find that they area not really as they seem. All in all a good read and I think that I am going to read his first book Little Girl Lost .