REVIEW: "A Dark and Secret Place" by Jen Williams
About two years ago, I sat in a hospital room with my mother and kept her company as she convalesced following a minor surgery.
We had the TV turned on, not because we were watching anything in particular but instead in an effort to drown out the beeps and chimes and chirps of the myriad machines that fill the modern hospital. I was only passively watching the screen when a commercial for some DNA-based ancestry tracking service — 23AndMe or something similar — flashed across it.
My mom, who was apparently watching more closely than I, spoke up from her hospital bed, telling me that she had always wanted to try one of those services, curious as she was about her ancestral nationality.
She must have been, I think, still slightly woozy from the residual anesthesia as it didn’t even seem to dawn on her that I would view such a prospect quite differently.
In fact, thinking back now, I'm even more certain that she didn't quite have her head about her because she seemed surprised when I said that I would have no interest in participating in such a process.
I wouldn’t want to risk being connected to someone on my father’s side of the family, I explained to her. And then she understood. She agreed, perhaps too aggressively, that I wouldn’t want to risk accidentally building a bridge to the mysterious island that has always been my paternal side.
I was actually taken aback by how aggressively she asserted that I wouldn’t want to meet my father’s family.
So I inquired as to why. What about these people made her so certain that any meeting I would have with them would end unhappily?
She hemmed and hawed and gave a non-answer, telling me that they just, “Weren’t my kind of people.”
Uncharacteristically, and in retrospect callously unconcerned about the fact that my mother had just gone through a medical procedure, I pressed. “Why aren’t they ‘my kind of people’?” I asked, “Are they… republicans?” I said, partly in jest.
“They might be republicans,” she told me, before continuing to explain, “But that’s not it. They’re just… They’re just completely different from you.”
Knowing after two attempts that I would get nothing approximating a true answer, I stopped pressing. But, since then, I have reflected upon this unexpected exchange many times. And, each time, I’ve wondered, how could I be so significantly different from the people who had made the person who was responsible for half of my DNA?
Is nurture really so much more powerful than nature?
My reflection on this unanswerable question was resurrected as I read A Dark and Secret Place.
As this novel opens, our protagonist, Heather, returns to her childhood home following her mother's unexpected death only to find that she perhaps did not know her mother at all.
The first indication that she didn’t truly know her mother as intimately as she had always assumed she did was the way in which her mother died, by suicide. Having never known her mother to suffer from depression — or even to be particularly sad — Heather was understandably shocked when she received the news.
So, as she returned home, she was somewhat expecting to find that there was a dark depth that her mother had deliberately kept hidden. But despite any preparations she took to ready herself for unexpected discoveries, what she found still shook her to her core.
Hidden in her mother’s things, tucked away in a biscuit tin, were years’ worth of correspondence. But it wasn’t the fact that her mother had written back and forth with a mysterious pen-pal that Heather found hard to swallow, it was the identity of the person who was on the other end of the exchange: Michael Reaves, a serial killer notorious both for his brutality and for the scope of his crimes.
Though Heather knew that digging deeper into her mother’s past was likely only to provide her more heartache, after her second shocking discovery in nearly as many days, she felt unable to stop seeking answers.
She may not have known her in life, Heather realized, but in death, she would finally learn the truth about her mother, regardless of the repercussions.
This book was as creepy as it was atmospheric. The dark and secret world that Jen Williams created with her prose absolutely grabbed readers from page one, making it all but impossible to set this book aside and attend to those pesky adult obligations.
Similarly strong was the robustness of the mystery. Readers are unlikely to anticipate the twists and turns that come with surprising consistency throughout this novel.
Despite these strengths, though, this book was not without its weaknesses.
As I moved deeper into this book, I found myself wishing that there had been more effort put into developing the relationship between Heather and her mother. Admittedly, really exploring this relationship would have proven difficult for the author, as Heather’s mother died before the events of the novel began.
Cognizant of this challenge, the lack of relationship development didn’t initially bother me. At the start, I was fine with the fact that Heather’s mother wasn’t truly her own character but instead only existed in relation to her lasting impact on Heather. But, as I read on, I found myself wishing that I could have seen something of this relationship. I found myself wishing that the author had peppered in some flashbacks so that we could see Heather interacting with her mother.
This addition would have helped me better understand the relationship between these two women. With an improved understanding of this relationship, I could have better understood the forces that were compelling Heather to push forward in her pursuit of the truth regarding her mother. As it was written, they seem like two different women, living in two different eras, wholly unconnected.
It’s been nearly a week since I finished this novel, and I still haven’t quite sorted my feelings in my head. This is probably a testament to the strength of the book as a whole, an indication of the fact that it was decidedly more complex than you would expect from a typical thriller. The one facet that I am struggling with most acutely is the final twist.
I either loved it, or I hated it. And I absolutely cannot decide which one.
A Dark and Secret Place will entertain you while inducing you to sleep with a lamp on. It’s a tightly woven thriller that is not for the faint of heart.
It earns 4 out of 5 cocktails.
Did you read this novel? What did you think of the ending? Tell me your opinions in the comments, below (spoiler alerting, of course!)
Okay. I think it’s time for a romance. Want to see what one I pick up? Subscribe to updates in the sidebar and follow me on Goodreads.
* Drink. Read. Repeat. is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. As an associate, we may earn commissions, at no cost to you, from qualifying purchases on Amazon.com
*I was provided a gifted copy of this title by the publisher*
