Not one person who reads The Dark Corners of the Night will think, for a second, that Meg Gardiner failed to deliver on the title.
Dark, check. Corners, check. And, yes, plenty of night.
Caitlin Hendrix’s latest prey, in the third entry in Gardiner’s UNSUB (unknown subject) series, is another level of diabolical. Sure, that sounds a bit over-the-top and cliché. How can one serial killer be worse than the last? I’d need to write the two words ‘spoiler alert’ to go into the details. I’m not going there. The twist, when it comes, is too juicy to ruin for even one reader. Twist? More like major wrinkle. You’ll hear yourself go, what? Suffice it to say that the stakes are raised more than a few notches after all that Caitlin Hendrix has endured in UNSUB (book one) and Into the Black Nowhere (book two and another a dead-on accurate title).
The Dark Corners of the Night features a wicked nemesis who dispatches adult couples inside their homes but purposely ensures that the children are left alive and forced to endure the subsequent nightmares. It’s a ritual. He wants to torment the kids. When the story starts, the Midnight Man has pulled off four such sets of murders. The initial batch of clues are sketchy, diffuse.
What’s appealing about the whole series is—wait for it—the thinking. The processing. The deducing. The hypotheses. The business of taking a clue and extracting as much information as possible. Yes, behavior analysis. And, hey, it’s fun. Gardiner puts us squarely in Hendrix’s shoes. How are we going to get this monster off the streets, how are we going to fix the world?
And FBI profiler Caitlin Hendrix is not alone. There’s an array of other law enforcement folks looking at the same evidence and developing their own theories or seeing things a different way.
Gardiner does many things well in building these stories, but here are two of the things that make them so successful. First, she rivets the unfolding story to the facts as they come. By “rivets,” I mean like the ones they use on rocket ships. No cheating. These are true procedurals, albeit with a whole cluster (Behavioral Analysis Unit) of coppers and criminologists and local law enforcement working the case. No sudden leaps allowed, no magical a-ha moments that aren’t grounded.
Second, supporting characters are not given short shrift. They are honored. Here’s one example: Nicholas Keyes, a “young analyst” who is “stop-sign tall, with Warby Parker frames, brown curls that flopped into his eyes, and an eager energy.” He is the youngest member of the BAU unit, “but Caitlin knew he had an analytical mind that only came with a rare confluence of inborn brilliance and years of intense study.”
Analytical, yes, but grounded in old-fashion, street-level understanding, too. Says Keyes, “I could sit at my desk at Quantico and pick apart five hundred crime scene photos, or zoom in on satellite images from multiple angles, but I wouldn’t understand how a location feels in the flesh. Where the shadows fall at two A.M. under a full moon. How the traffic lights are sequenced late at night … I need to get out there.” Caitlin would agree.
Keyes and Caitlin head out to study one scene in particular and look for patterns at the same time of night as the Midnight Man executed his crimes. Scouring the neighborhood, they soon realize that the killer waits “until the earth turns her back to the sun” and that the killer’s behavior is not completely random.
And that leads them to thinking about the patterns and behaviors, the timing of the four sets of murders to date, and that leads them to a clue that pays huge benefits way down the road as they close in on the killer’s ID. Nonetheless, we are only an inch closer to tracking down the bad guy. In the end, it’s a jigsaw puzzle of information and part of the pleasure is watching which pieces fit and which ones get discarded. The killer’s freakishness, thinks Hendrix, sets him apart. “He seemed to exist in an eerie crack where algorithms strained to reach.”
As I said, Keyes is only one such supporting character. And none of Caitlin’s expanded circle of comrades are cartoons or types. They could be the central figure in these investigations (one senses) if Gardiner had chosen a different pair of eyes to observe the same storyline. Maybe. Caitlin’s got her own strong arc and, really, if this all sounds intriguing in any way you need to start with UNSUB and follow Caitlin’s rise and professional growth.
It’s Keyes who tells Caitlin that the key is observing “the way humans move, search, and hunt are universal patterns … Because the way all animals move, search, and hunt are universal patterns. We rely on routine. We use the least effort possible. We’re comfortable in familiar geography.”
And Caitlin knows Midnight Man will not be obvious. Again, experience. Thinking.
“Caitlin was well used to criminals who appeared polite, neat, and amiable. Even murderers didn’t stomp around screaming like figures from a Hieronymous Bosch hellscape 24/7. They watched television and grilled hamburgers and updated their LinkedIn profiles hoping for that promotion. Only a few unlucky people saw the mask slip, the rage uncoil, the knife emerge. Everyone else got the bland platitudes from the guy in the corporate polo shirt with the assistant manager/s name tag pinned to his chest.”
Yes, Gardiner is referencing the artist. But did someone say Bosch? Caitlin Hendrix is as good at processing small mountains of information as Michael Connelly’s chief protagonist. (Maybe Gardiner was throwing a friendly side-eye; who knows?)
Read the series. Book four comes out next month (June 2024). It’s called Shadow Heart. (Gardiner is also busy working with Michael Mann; she co-wrote Heat 2 with Mann, using characters from the famous film, and a third ‘Heat’ book has been announced.) But don’t overlook the UNSUB series–just don’t.
Previously reviewed:
Don't Need A Diagram 