Darkness All Around
by Doug Magee
Review: Doug Magee's second stand-alone, Darkness All Around, has as its premise an intriguing storyline, but is not sufficiently engaging to capture and maintain much interest in how it all turns out.
Set in rural Pennsylvania, the book opens with the murder of a young woman, Carol, and the disappearance of a local man, Sean, who is married to Carol's best friend Risa. Fast forward long enough for Risa to have Sean declared dead, and to have remarried. Though Sean was not a suspect in Carol's death, he has visions of Carol and wants to know why he is compelled after all these years to remember what happened to her and seeks out those who were around at the time to help him understand why he thinks he may have, indeed, murdered Carol.
If one wants to designate, or latch on to, a single character as the investigator for in this murder mystery, it is Henry Saltz, a reporter for the local paper. He was dispatched to the scene of Carol's murder, and even years later is still haunted by the sight of the severely slashed body. Sean's return has reopened a story he thought he finished yet not completely forgotten about. "This time it was the mystery of it all. The case, in the course of five days, had gone from a neat package in a file drawer to a ragged, unkempt mess hopping around his office, a new discovery every day."
But the story never really comes together in a satisfactory manner. The ending is deftly handled, but much of what precedes it is a slow-paced muddled mess. At times this book is solidly romantic suspense; at other times the characters seem to be in amateur sleuth mode, investigating a decade-old murder; still at other times the narrative is in a noirish state that tries to be atmospheric and foreboding but is neither. Elements — maybe too many elements — of a crime novel are present here, but the potential of Darkness All Around to be a winning novel of suspense is never realized.
Acknowledgment: Touchstone provided an ARC of Darkness All Around for this review.
Review Copyright © 2011 — Hidden Staircase Mystery Books — All Rights Reserved
Selected reviews of other mysteries by this author …
Never Wave Goodbye
Touchstone (Hardcover), June 2010
ISBN-13: 9781439153987; ISBN-10: 1439153981
Location(s) referenced in Darkness All Around: Pennsylvania
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Darkness All Around by Doug Magee
Publisher: Touchstone
Format: Hardcover
ISBN-10: 1-4391-5402-3
ISBN-13: 978-1-4391-5402-1
Publication Date: October 2011
List Price: $25.00
Synopsis (from the publisher): When there’s darkness all around … some memories are best forgotten …
Within the span of one harrowing week, Risa’s alcoholic husband, Sean, disappears, and her best friend, Carol, is brutally murdered. Eleven years later, Risa has seemingly put her life back together again, comforted by the love of her new husband, who is a local politician, and the knowledge that Carol’s killer has been convicted. But then just as suddenly as he disappeared, Sean resurfaces — sober, plagued by horrific recollections of Carol’s murder, and convinced he was the real killer.
Sean’s startling claim buzzes through the small, football-crazy Pennsylvania community, and Risa is left to wonder if the man she still loves actually committed the grisly murder. Her growing belief in his innocence sends her on a treacherous search for the truth: a search that reveals ugly secrets that her new husband and the town’s law enforcement community are hiding.
Emboldened by her discoveries, Risa convinces Sean to flee as the town’s violent forces move in to keep the truth from coming to light. But Risa doesn’t realize that her attempts to get vindication for Sean may come at a very high price.