Paula McLain's latest book, and her first crime novel, When The Stars Go Dark (#1,005) is both dark and personal. Anna Hart, a detective who specializes in missing and kidnapped children and teens, is in a terrible place in her life. She's driven to return to the one place which offered her a true home as she was bounced around the foster care system growing up. Hap and Eden, the couple who took her in in Mendicino, California, taught her a number of survival lessons, both physical and emotional. Perhaps by returning there, she can find some balance in her own life.
As luck would have it, she arrives in Mendicino just as a teenager has gone missing, an echo of an earlier tragedy when Anna was still living there. The sheriff is an old friend and totally out of his depth, so Anna volunteers to lend her expertise to the search for Cameron Curtis. Soon another girl goes missing in a nearby town. As Anna becomes obsessed with finding Cameron she begins to wonder if the perpetrator might be hiding in plain sight. Following her instincts leads her to the right solution, but will she survive to see justice done?
It took me a bit to get into this book, but I'm glad I stuck with it as the layers unpeel in Anna's story. The reader doesn't learn the nature of Anna's personal demon until the end of the book. As Ms. McLain says, this book is deeply personal to her, and she provides a number of good resources for further exploration of the topic of missing and abused children at the end. She really is the consummate storyteller.
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