THE MIDNIGHT SHIFT

Foul play of a supernatural sort may be responsible for a string of deaths ascribed to suicide at a long-term-care hospital.

In this horror-mystery hybrid, a bestseller in South Korea, a detective named Suyeon arrives on the scene after a 74-year-old man has apparently jumped to his death from the sixth floor of Cheolma Rehabilitation Hospital—the fourth death by suicide at the facility within one month. Suyeon’s superior is inclined to believe that the notes the jumpers left behind are authentic, that the suicides were copycats and reflect the bleak environment of a long-term-care facility. But Suyeon has her doubts. For one reason, there’s been a curious absence of blood at the death scenes. And why has every jump been from the sixth floor? Also having her doubts is a woman Suyeon meets when she returns to the scene: “They were thrown,” the stranger says. “Picked up after they were already dead, or as good as dead, and hurled. Hard.” The woman is cagey but tells Suyeon her name—Violette—and that “I put away bad guys too.” And she’s going to need Suyeon’s help. Chapters from the point of view of the colorless Suyeon, “a believer of cold, hard facts,” switch off with other perspectives, including that of an adolescent Violette as she is introduced to the vampire world; these overheated passages, set in the 1980s, can read like juvenilia. The rigorous logic characterizing the mystery novel is pointedly and playfully at odds with the irrationality of supernatural fiction, and the payoff potential heavily favors horror fans. Although there’s a deftly pulled-through thread about loneliness and some interesting philosophical riffing about a vampire’s justifications for murder, everything is harbored in a story in which events proceed pretty much as expected.

Miss of the vampire.