In the Dark

In the historic leafy suburbs of North Oxford, a construction crew renovating a house accidentally breaks through a cellar wall in the house next door to find a young woman and a child imprisoned. Both are starving and psychologically scarred. The elderly homeowner denies any knowledge of the pair or how they came to be trapped in a secret room in his basement. At first, it looks like a horrifyingly familiar case of kidnapping, wrongful imprisonment, and assault--but some facts don't add up. The retired professor's escalating dementia and deteriorating physical condition complicate the case against him. Then there's the unsolved case of a young female BBC reporter, who vanished two years before from a house in the same neighborhood. In the second "DI Fawley" novel, Hunter relates the investigative process of Adam Fawley and his squad through a combination of first- and third-person narration, media coverage, and transcribed police interrogation interviews, gradually unwinding a case that is much more complicated that it initially appears. VERDICT This slow-burning procedural builds with tension as the narrative moves through several cunning twists, offering fans a pleasing follow-up to the first book in the series, Close to Home.--Lindsay Morton, P.L. of Science, San Francisco

December 1, 2018
Hunter's second Adam Fawley procedural?after Close to Home (2018)?is a tense exploration of manipulation and betrayal. Workmen renovating a semidetached home in a transitioning Oxford, England, neighborhood find a starving woman and a small boy imprisoned in the adjoining home's basement. The homeowner, William Harper, has dementia and angrily denies knowing about the basement prison. The traumatized victim refuses to speak to detectives or see her son. Relying on physical evidence, DI Adam Fawley and his CID team piece together a horrifying narrative: the toddler is linked by DNA to Harper, whose DNA was also found on a mattress in the basement room. Their tidy theory, however, becomes complicated when the body of missing journalist, Hannah Gardiner, is found under Harper's shed. Attempting to quiet doubts about the elderly suspect's ability to kidnap and bury Hannah without witnesses, Fawley's team digs into Hannah's husband's and nanny's accounts of her final days. A solid psychological thriller with carefully developed characters and disturbing, cleverly masked revelations that will appeal to fans of Tana French and Sophie Hannah's procedurals.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)