The Place: Seawings, a beautiful art deco home overlooking the sweep of the bay in Midtown-on-Sea.
The Crime: The gilded Holden family – Piper and Gray and their two teenage children – have vanished from the house without a trace.
The Detective: DS Saul Anguish, brilliant but with a dark past, treads the narrow line between light and shade.
One late autumn morning, Piper’s best friend arrives at Seawings to discover an eerie scene – the radio is playing, phones are charging on the worktop, the cars are in the garage. But the house is deserted.
In fifteen-year-old Riva Holden’s bedroom, scrawled across the mirror in blood, are three words:
Make
Them
Stop.
What happens next?
Book Info: Print length: 331 pages. Publisher: Macmilloan. Publication Date: 14 April 2022
Fiona Cummins is an award-winning former journalist and a graduate of the Faber Academy, where she now teaches her own Writing Crime course. She is the bestselling author of five crime thriller novels, all of which have received widespread critical acclaim from household names including Val McDermid, Lee Child, David Baldacci, Martina Cole and Ian Rankin. Three of her novels have been optioned for television.
Rattle, her debut, has been translated into several languages and Marcel Berlins wrote in The Times: ‘Amid the outpouring of crime novels, Rattle is up there with the best of them.’ Fiona was selected for McDermid’s prestigious New Blood panel at the 2017 Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, where her novel was nominated for a Dead Good Reader Award for Most Exceptional Debut. A sequel, The Collector, was published in February 2018 and David Baldacci described it as ‘A crime novel of the very first order’.
Her third novel – standalone thriller The Neighbour – was published in April 2019. Ian Rankin called it ‘creepy as hell’. Her fourth novel When I Was Ten, an Irish Times bestseller, was published in April 2021. Into The Dark, Fiona’s fifth novel, was published in April 2022 and was described by Sarah Vaughan, author of Netflix smash-hit Anatomy of A Scandal, as ‘Complex. Inventive. Twisty. Unsettling.’ The Daily Mail said it was ‘breathtakingly good’. It is currently longlisted for the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year. Her sixth novel, All Of Us Are Broken, the second in her series featuring troubled detective Saul Anguish, will be published in July 2023.
When Fiona is not writing, she can be found on Twitter, eating biscuits or walking her dogs. She lives in Essex with her family.
My Review:
If you have read any of Fiona Cummins previous books (Rattle, The Collector, The Neighbour, When I Was Ten), then you will know you are in for a dark, twisty and unpredictable treat.
Into the Dark was published in April 2022 and is the first in a new series featuring DS Saul Anguish. Eagle eyed readers will recognise his name from The Collector and if, like me, you need to read books in order, I would definitely recommend reading Rattle and The Collector anyway.
Into the Dark is set in a small seaside town called Midtown-on-Sea. Inhabited by the rich and privileged, it is home to best friends Piper Holden and Julianne Hillier. Every morning, without fail, Piper and Julianne go for a run together, however when Julianne arrives at Piper’s luxury masion called Seawings there is no-one there. The family cars are in the driveway, the children’s school bags are at the front door, the mobile phones are still charging and the breakfast plates are on the table half-eaten. With the entire Holden family missing the police are called and upon further investigation they find blood splatter and a strange message scrawled on the teenage daughter’s bedroom mirror.
DS Saul Anguish is a new policeman having just arrived in Midtown-on-Sea, he is put on the case of the missing family and soon finds himself facing his own demons. Struggling to fit in, he teams up with Dr Clover March, a forensic linguist also new to Midtown-on-Sea and also facing her own demons and together their forge an unlikely partnership.
The books is told through multiple characters points of views and timelines, switching back and forth from the lead up to the family’s disappearance to the current police investigation. Once again, the author has created some really unlikeable characters and seamlessly blends their backstories and secrets together weaving a very twisted and dark tale.
Into the Dark is a perfect crime thriller guaranteed to keep the reader guessing throughout and eagerly turning those pages to find out what really did happen to the Holden family.
