Find You in the Dark
by Nathan Ripley
In this chilling and disquieting debut thriller perfect for fans of Caroline Kepnes’s Hidden Bodies and Jeff Lindsay’s Dexter series, 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…
❃❃Find You in the Dark releases June 19th❃❃
Kobo
Momma Says: 3 stars⭐⭐⭐
I finished Find You in the Dark with mixed feelings. On the one hand, it does have the creepy vibe I'd expect from a thriller, but that gripping need to turn one more page is missing. Despite Martin's 'hobby,' the pacing is very slow for most of the book. Parts of the story are repetitive and Martin's inner monologue was drawn out and much of time, not all that interesting. It reached a point that I found myself enjoying the scenes with Martin's too smart for her own good, teenage daughter more than the disturbing parts of the story. Her sense of humor and sass did add some levity to an otherwise dark and sometimes tedious tale. I think part of my disappointment lay in the way things played out in the book. We know from the blurb that Martin draws the attention of a serial killer, and I expected there to be something of a cat and mouse game between them. That I didn't get that is on me and my own preconceptions, but considering the length of the book, I just expected more. In the end, the story did have a lot of potential and I enjoyed some parts of it, but other parts came up lacking for me, leaving me with a bit of a 'meh' feeling.
❃❃ARC provided by NetGalley and Atria Books
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