The Dark Corners of The Night by Meg Gardiner

The Dark Corners of The Night by Meg Gardiner

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Title: The Dark Corners of The Night

Author: Meg Gardiner

Year Published: 2020

Format: Physical book

Genre: Fiction, Thriller, Mystery

Review*:

   TW: Self harm, cutting

   This was sent to me via The Bookish Box from the publisher. Although I did receive this book, a letter from the author, and an enamel pin for free; my opinions of this book are entirely my own. The Dark Corners of The Night is the third book in the UNSUB series, however it is not necessary to read the previous two books in order to get through this book.
    Although this is the third book and it's even mentioned on Goodreads that you don't need to read the other two, I think having more background would have really enhanced this story. I have a friend of mine who is really into murder-thrillers so we decided to read the series together. 

   For the first 2/3 of this book, I didn't know if I was going to find any enjoyment or just mark this off in a 'check-list fashion'. Our main character wasn't super relatable, the romance was meh, and the actual plot seemed more daunting than enjoyable. I started to question reading these books out of order.

  Our main character, Caitlin Hendrix, is young, a child of a local police officer, and in a romantic entanglement with her best(?) friends ex-husband who they have a child with and the ex doesn't know. She is an FBI agent who is currently assigned to a string of homicides in L.A., but still has her toes in the door of a serial-bomber that happened to hit her best friend and that her boyfriend is currently on case for. 

   In L.A., the murders start with the homes of sleepy Americans being broken into and the parents being shot but the children left fine. Almost all of them are the same family dynamic of two heterosexual married parents with at least one child. Then the murderer slips up and he's left without satisfying his kill. Meanwhile, LAPD and the FBI are trying to find any information on who this killer is other than his extremely clean and methodical ways to make sure he wont get caught, including extracting the bullets from his victims.

   After leaving a witness to the murderers escape and a couple of detrimental screw ups, Caitlin and her team start finding a trail to lead them back to an identity on their killer. Right as the tables turn, an anonymous video leak and very brave little girl, they get the final piece to the puzzle just as their young witness is abducted by the serial killer.

   I had a few frustrations with the way the cops were obtaining information, that I think were somewhat stimulated expectations based on TV shows displaying information. At one point, the witness claims to have seen that the suspect has identifying features that link them back to a Highschool, like the hoodie he is wearing and a parking sticker on his car. Then they get into a police chase that they more clearly identify the car as. At no point did they blatantly have anyone triangulate the information about the high school, high school mascot, car type, and the fact that they thought the suspect was a cop's kid. That would have narrowed down a lot of the suspect pool to try to get ahead of the next killing that someone from an office in LAPD could have worked on. Although this piece frustrated me a little bit, I also stepped back and thought of real-world scenarios and that they may have staffing issues which I thought landed this book more in reality than TV shows do. 

   The last 100 pages is when the book really started to accelerate. As much as I was indifferent to Caitlin and she seemed more like a vehicle for the POV than an actual useful character, it changed when the case picked up. She displayed some of her own emotional vulnerability, there was also a really clear resolution that I thought was realistic in trying to tackle your own demons that you are coming to closure with. By the end of the book I found that she was a pretty cool person, even though I still don't necessarily agree with her relationship situation.

  If you love police thrillers, I would suggest at least this book so far. It was pretty easy to fly through content wise and was over-all enjoyable.

*This section may contain spoilers.