In the Dark Review
⭐⭐⭐⭐ (3.5 Stars)
Cara Hunter's second novel in the DI Adam Fawley series starts with a bang. Two workers busy renovating the cellar of an Oxford home peer through a crack in a wall to discover an unconscious woman and a young boy imprisoned in horrid conditions in the basement of an adjoining house. When police investigate, they find a senile, old man living upstairs, seemingly incapable of being the primary suspect to such a heinous crime. But with the boy too young to talk and the woman incapacitated in hospital, DI Adam Fawley must doggedly track down clues, which leads him to a previous case of his that went badly astray.
The author, Cara Hunter, utilizes a dizzying array of multiple point-of-view storylines, each with slow-burn backstories and family dramas that made it difficult for me to keep up. Furthermore, she writes in a be-your-own-detective style that requires the reader to review detailed articles, emails, transcripts, police drawings, and notes as they arise. Furthermore, although this is the DI Adam Fawley series, I didn't see him as the book's main character. With only subtle clues about his past and more focus on the potential suspects and the family lives of his fellow detectives, he was not a grounding character to guide me through a weaving storyline.
Yet, for lovers of police procedurals who want to peer over a detective's shoulder, this could be the series for you. But before you jump in, you will also need to decide how many POV shifts are too much. If your answer is more than five, you should give this book a pass. While many good POV-shifting books weave between characters deftly (especially in fantasy series), those books are not ones I typically seek out.
Overall, I can see why fans of police procedurals love her work. Like most debut authors, she wrote her first novel based chiefly on her google research. But for her second, her publisher suggested she consult with a working detective, who, rather than arresting her for her google search history, helped her craft an expertly developed be-your-own-detective mystery.