City Dark: A Thriller

The dark in the title refers to the power outage in New York City in 1977. In the midst of the blackout, two young boys are left in their mother’s car while she goes to fetch gas. She never returns. Forty years later, one of the boys, Joe, learns that a body found on the beach at Coney Island might be his mother’s.

Now an assistant attorney general and a binge-drinking alcoholic, evidence begins to mount against him. Did he kill his own mother in a drunken stupor? When a second murder occurs and more evidence is found implicating Joe, he becomes the primary suspect.

Prior to these events, Joe had secured the continued institutional confinement of Aaron Hathorne, a serial pedophile and master manipulator. Armed with this information, the reader can see the broad outline of the story’s outcome before either Joe or the police can connect the dots.

The interest of City Dark lies in whether Joe and the detectives can unearth the truth before the trap closes. With a nicely honed mix of dark passages and surprising revelations, City Dark is a gritty, cleverly plotted, and well written police procedural that will intrigue mystery fans.