“A Tooth for a Tooth” by Denny Darke

A Tooth for a Tooth

Denny Darke
Papillon Creative (2026)
ISBN: 978-1997919018
Reviewed by Paul Knobloch for Reader Views (08/2026)

Denny Darke’s A Tooth for a Tooth is a gleefully macabre crime novel populated by killers, con artists, crooked preachers, pampered dogs, amateur sleuths, and enough hidden identities to make practically everyone in Horseshoe Bay worth investigating. Darke combines black comedy with a serial-killer thriller, producing a story that is frequently outrageous but also surprisingly interested in the question of who gets to decide when justice has been served.

At the center of the novel is Marion Belle, an elderly resident of the upscale Covenant Cove retirement community. Marion appears respectable, religious, and compassionate. She is also a serial killer. Her preferred method is suffocation, and she preserves numbered pillows from her murders as trophies. Marion does not consider herself evil. Quite the contrary: she regards many of her killings as acts of mercy or divine judgment, making her simultaneously frightening and very funny. Darke gets considerable mileage from the discrepancy between the harmless old woman everyone sees and the calculating murderer operating beneath the surface.

Marion soon becomes entangled with Reverend Everett Boyle, an ex-con who has discovered that religion provides an excellent opportunity for reinvention. Everett is developing Heaven’s Gate Life Insurance, a scheme through which elderly residents can conveniently place their affairs in his hands. Marion provides him with potential clients while pursuing an agenda of her own. Their alliance is inevitably unstable because neither trusts the other, and both possess information capable of destroying the other.

Complicating matters are veterinarian Lucien Mallet and his wife, Milly. Lucien is actually Saul Maçon, a fugitive with an extraordinarily violent past that includes his involvement in the catastrophic Burnside prison fire. This gives A Tooth for a Tooth one of its most entertaining inversions: the man gradually investigating a serial killer is, himself, a killer trying desperately not to attract the attention of the police. Lucien recognizes Marion because, in a sense, he understands her. Predators are often particularly good at recognizing other predators.

Darke handles this increasingly elaborate collection of secrets with considerable skill. Marion’s murders become more reckless, Everett realizes their arrangement could destroy him, Lucien and Milly begin quietly collecting evidence, and law enforcement finally notices that an extraordinary number of people around Covenant Cove are dying under peculiar circumstances. The various plots eventually begin folding together rather than simply running alongside one another.

The novel is also very funny, although its humor is decidedly dark. Much of it comes from incongruity: murder and retirement-community gossip, theological language and insurance fraud, serial killers and veterinary dentistry. Dogs play an unexpectedly prominent role throughout the novel, sometimes as comic relief and sometimes as surprisingly important participants in the plot. Darke is particularly good at allowing absurdity to develop naturally from his characters rather than stopping the story simply to deliver jokes.

Beneath all this mayhem is a recurring concern with false respectability. Covenant Cove appears safe. Everett appears pious. Marion appears harmless. Lucien appears to be an ordinary veterinarian. Again and again, the novel demonstrates how easily people accept identities that conform to their expectations. As an elderly Christian woman, Marion is nearly invisible as a potential murderer, just as Everett understands the authority conferred upon him by clerical clothing and religious language.

The title points toward the book’s larger preoccupation with retribution. Almost everyone believes somebody deserves punishment, but there is no reliable moral authority deciding who should administer it. Marion has her theology, Everett his rationalizations, Lucien his peculiar code, and the police the actual law. The result is a world in which justice and vengeance become increasingly difficult to distinguish.

Darke is particularly good at making thoroughly disreputable characters enormously entertaining without pretending that they are admirable people. The result is an inventive and wickedly funny crime novel in which nearly everyone has a secret, practically nobody has clean hands, and sometimes the most dangerous person in the room is the sweet old lady nobody thought to suspect.