Find You In The Dark
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Average rating3.4
"A family man with a habit of digging up the past catches the attention of a serial killer who wants anything but his secrets uncovered. For years, unbeknownst to his wife and teenage daughter, Martin Reese has been illegally buying police files on serial killers and obsessively studying them, using them as guides to find the missing bodies of victims. He doesn't take any souvenirs, just photos that he stores in an old laptop, and then he turns in the results anonymously. Martin sees his work as a public service, a righting of wrongs. Detective Sandra Whittal sees the situation differently. On a meteoric rise in police ranks due to her case-closing efficiency, Whittal is suspicious of the mysterious source she calls the Finder, especially since he keeps leading the police right to the bodies. Even if he isn't the one leaving bodies behind, how can she be sure he won't start soon? On his latest dig, Martin searches for the first kill of Jason Shurn, the early 1990s murderer who may have been responsible for the disappearance of his wife's sister. But when he arrives at the site, he finds more than just bones. There's a freshly killed body--a young and missing Seattle woman--lying among remains that were left there decades ago. Someone else knew where Jason Shurn left the corpses of his victims ... and that someone isn't happy that Martin has been going around digging up his work. And when a crooked cop with a tenuous tie to Martin vanishes, Whittal begins to zero in on the Finder. Hunted by a real killer and by Whittal, Martin realizes that in order to escape, he may have to go deeper into the killer's dark world than he ever thought.."--
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This book was provided to me by NetGalley for free in exchange for an honest review.
Wow I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It took me a little while longer than usual to get through it but that's only because I was savouring it. I was so curious how it was going to come together at the end and i have to say it was done very well. Everything I was curious about got covered very well.
I have to say that I kind of wish at the end that his daughter died. Not that I am a horrible person who wants to read about people's suffering but I feel like it would have had more of a gut punch. This mad did everything he could including killing someone to get his daughter back only to have her be killed anyway, it would have been more shocking. Nevertheless I still do like my happy endings, even though let's be honest, that poor girl's life will never be the same.
My only complaint about the writing was that it was written from the first person point of view in the main character's chapters but everyone else was in third person. I don't see why there needed to be this inconsistency, as we know of course that Reese is the main character and we would not feel strayed from that.
I would definitely recommend it to anyone who likes thrillers and something that is more neutral than just hero and bad guy as it delves a bit into Reese's psyche and kind of why he does the things he does.
The first half of this novel moves slowly; as a reader, you're trying to figure out exactly how off the rails the protagonist's life is going to go, how sick he really is, and who he is really hurting. When the plot begins to pick up pace, you're (well, I am) tempted to stay up late or skim a few pages to figure out how it ends–who is going to get punished? who gets away with what? etc.
When my book club discussed this novel, we circled around the difficult territory of asking ourselves what parts of the novel are Ripley playing with the tropes of thriller fiction and which parts are perhaps him indulging (unconsciously) in the kinds of misogynist narratives that feed so much of this genre of fiction. Because the protagonist doesn't, himself, kill women, a reader may find him/herself tempted to see him as a better/healthier kind of psychopath (a la Dexter). But when you inspect the gender constructions of both the healthy-seeming and pathological relationships in the novel, you (ok–I mean me) find yourself wondering why did Ripley feel the need to go over the worn territory of “creepy dude stalks and kills vulnerable women” narrative in the first place.
I confess that #metoo and reading about Junot Diaz and other authors' sexual aggression toward women and the response that, if one looks closely at these authors' books, one can clearly see their attitudes about women, figured into my reading of this novel more than I thought it would. Where is the joy, the thrill, the excitement, of writing about the savage murders of so many women ? Is that not misogyny, full stop?
