Karen
On Halloween, a group of teenage students meet in the woods near Sally in the Wood, a road steeped in local lore and rumored to be haunted by the ghost of a murdered girl. By the end of the night, one student will be dead.
Teenagers from an exclusive boarding school, a deep dark English wood, myths of haunting, rituals and rumours, and Halloween combine in ONE DARK NIGHT to create a creepy, claustrophobic thriller that's steeped in family and community simmering tensions.
The story is told from three main viewpoints: School Counsellor Rachel, her ex-husband DC Ben Chase, and their rebellious teen daughter Ellie. Rachel works at Folly View College, an exclusive upmarket boarding school, is very recently divorced from Chase, who has a new girlfriend which is causing quite a bit of tension with Rachel and the fallout isn't helping teenager Ellie who is rebelling against her parents and the world in general.
The discovery of the body of one of Ellie's school friends, battered and broken at the bottom of a stone folly deep in the woods where the students were partying on Halloween doesn't help the family dynamic as Ellie's parents come to realise she's been keeping a lot of secrets from them, and Chase's investigation is complicated by the involvement of his fractured family in the school, and the group of teenagers who are integral to explaining what happened that night.
Tension then, a lot of of it of the domestic variety, a lot of it revolving around the school with a creepy caretaker and handsome art teacher to add to the mix and a bully and a troubled homeless recluse at the fringes. The storyline here is bolstered considerably by the creepy sense of place, creating an atmosphere that infects everything and everybody, well supported by a sense of pace that never quite allows the reader to settle, always pushing, always keeping the pieces of the plot moving deftly around the storyboard.
Whilst the mystery itself is well served by ONE DARK NIGHT, upon reflection, it's the underlying messages that have the most potency, not just that bullying and gaslighting exist, but how the online world can be used as a toolkit to find the vulnerable, hone the targeting, and manipulate the unaware and unwary.
Originally posted at www.austcrimefiction.org.
On Halloween, a group of teenage students meet in the woods near Sally in the Wood, a road steeped in local lore and rumored to be haunted by the ghost of a murdered girl. By the end of the night, one student will be dead.
Teenagers from an exclusive boarding school, a deep dark English wood, myths of haunting, rituals and rumours, and Halloween combine in ONE DARK NIGHT to create a creepy, claustrophobic thriller that's steeped in family and community simmering tensions.
The story is told from three main viewpoints: School Counsellor Rachel, her ex-husband DC Ben Chase, and their rebellious teen daughter Ellie. Rachel works at Folly View College, an exclusive upmarket boarding school, is very recently divorced from Chase, who has a new girlfriend which is causing quite a bit of tension with Rachel and the fallout isn't helping teenager Ellie who is rebelling against her parents and the world in general.
The discovery of the body of one of Ellie's school friends, battered and broken at the bottom of a stone folly deep in the woods where the students were partying on Halloween doesn't help the family dynamic as Ellie's parents come to realise she's been keeping a lot of secrets from them, and Chase's investigation is complicated by the involvement of his fractured family in the school, and the group of teenagers who are integral to explaining what happened that night.
Tension then, a lot of of it of the domestic variety, a lot of it revolving around the school with a creepy caretaker and handsome art teacher to add to the mix and a bully and a troubled homeless recluse at the fringes. The storyline here is bolstered considerably by the creepy sense of place, creating an atmosphere that infects everything and everybody, well supported by a sense of pace that never quite allows the reader to settle, always pushing, always keeping the pieces of the plot moving deftly around the storyboard.
Whilst the mystery itself is well served by ONE DARK NIGHT, upon reflection, it's the underlying messages that have the most potency, not just that bullying and gaslighting exist, but how the online world can be used as a toolkit to find the vulnerable, hone the targeting, and manipulate the unaware and unwary.
Originally posted at www.austcrimefiction.org.