Only Darkness

by Danuta Reah

Book Overview

Dark, edgy and unbearably tense, this extraordinarily accomplished first novel is both a love story and a gripping psychological thriller of immense power. Debbie Sykes is a young college lecturer... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0006513158
• ISBN13: 9780006513155
• Release Date: January 2000
• Publisher: Not Avail
• Length: 260 Pages

Customer Reviews

Believable - kept me hooked...

Debbie Sykes, a young college lecturer, leaves work one cold stormy night to catch her usual train home and observes that the station is eerily dark and barren. Moments before arriving at the platform, she'd heard a loud crashing sound of glass being broken, but no one appears to be around including the young woman that she normally shares the train with. Suddenly, out of the darkness a menacing looking man steps out of the shadows and moves toward her. Recognizing that there has been several killings in the area Debbie becomes frightened and flees when her train finally arrives only minutes later. The next day she reads in the paper that the woman that she frequently shared the train with was one of the latest victims found in a deserted area of the train tracks. Debbie worries she might have seen the murderer. She innocently mentions her suspiousions to one of her colleagues at the college (other than the police) who has connections to the press and her story ends up in the papers. Killers read the papers too. This is more of a psychological suspense thriller (woman being stalked by serial killer) than a mystery in the whodunit style, although you're never sure who the killer is. I enjoyed the story, and I liked the characters as well, specifically the often curious relationship between Debbie and Rob Neave, college security officer and ex-police detective. Rob has suffered a horrific personal tragedy in his recent past and has since left the force. Because of this he has become emotionally distant, quite and despondent. Even so, his police instincts kicks in and he fears Debbie may be the next victim of the train track serial killer and he becomes involved in the investigation. Surprisingly there is a bit of romance and sexual couplings in this story that I hadn't anticipated, but it wasn't unwelcome either. I was just as interested in Rob's past and his possible future with Debbie as I was in who the killer might be. I did have a few minor problems with the story, however. First the style of writing was different from what I'm used to. It took a few chapters to warm up to the author's prose, but once I got into the story it stopped being an issue. Additionally there were a few things that didn't compute with me - when the police asks Debbie numerous times if she'd been getting any strange phone calls, and she answers no, when, in fact, she was getting scores of hang-up calls at work and at home - that was becoming rather annoying. OK that is minor but it irritated me to no end. Furthermore, this story wasn't one shocking clue after another as one usually finds in a thriller/mystery, therefore it was a tad slow and disjointed in places, but there are plenty of dark and edgy moments as well. This is a good book for being the author's first crime fiction novel. It's believable with sympathetic characters. I enjoyed the book enough that I ended up ordering all the author's other books too.