Hello everyone!
I am back with another review, today it is Find You In The Dark by Nathan Ripley. Thanks so much to NetGalley and Simon and Schuster Canada for providing me with an eARC of this book for an honest review. As always, all opinions are my own.
This book follows Martin Reese, an early retired tech family man. He'll do anything for his wife and daughter. He spends his free time buying old cold cases and anonymously finding the bodies of women who have been taken, murdered and buried by local serial killers. It's about justice, justice for the families and justice for the women. But as Martin begins the search for his wife's sister, who is presumed dead after disappearing 20 years earlier, his hobby turns into an obsession. The police discover a recent runaway in one of Martin's digs and soon they begin to focus on uncovering this modern day superhero.
So, there is a lot going on in this book! The pacing of the book did seem a little bit on the slower side of things, but it didn't bother me too much because there was so much happening and so much to digest, any faster pace would have wrecked havoc on the storyline. I think I've kind of just become accustomed to not really knowing the characters in these sort of thrillers, mainly because so much of the focus is on plot and not character development, but I think that Ripley did a great job differentiating the characters and really describing them well.
While I will say I'm still not 100% sure why Martin does what he does, I can, I don't want to say understand, but understand, why he does them. The only thrill for him is the discovery - solving the puzzle - and justice. Things were a bit obsessive from pretty early on, but you can look past them because he is doing good. Even in the end, people realize that.
This wasn't your typical psychological thriller, either. It was slow burning in the best way and less about mind games. It was the perfect blend of a crime thriller with the detective POVs, having Martin 'in charge' of investigations left less room for stuffy, political police drama that often runs rampant in crime thrillers.
In the end, I feel like most things were wrapped up nicely and like reality (hang on here, I might get a bit philosophical and cynical) the book shows that there are varying degrees of badness in people - and sometimes we have to let some of that badness out to become goodness. I don't know if that makes any sense but what I am trying to say is that things aren't black and white, not all good people are good all the time and not all bad people are bad all the time. There are moments of weakness, of stress, of life, that blur this line.
This book was very unique, in terms of others I have read. I'm not super familiar with Dexter, so I can't say how accurate that comparison is but I've certainly never read anything quite like this before.
All that being said, I just felt like there was something missing. I can't quite put my finger on it, and the fact that I read this book in a matter of hours shows you that I still really enjoyed it, but there is just something that could have pushed it over the top.
Overall, a unique and interesting story!