The Familiar Dark

Starred review from February 3, 2020
The stark prologue of this harrowing thriller from Engel (The Roanoke Girls) recounts the final moments of 12-year-old best friends Izzy Logan and Junie Taggert, slaughtered on an abandoned playground in their impoverished hometown in the Missouri Ozarks. Junie’s single mom, Eve, a feisty, funny, sometimes foulmouthed diner waitress, is shattered by the news, but she swiftly becomes enraged by what she sees as a less than vigorous probe by the local police, including her idolized older brother, Cal, who she suspects may be writing off the murders as collateral damage from the meth ring run by their own abusive, long-estranged pit bull of a mother. Feeling she has nothing left to lose, a vengeance-bent Eve ignores Cal’s warnings to leave investigating to the professionals and begins asking questions of dangerous people with plenty to hide. Without sacrificing any of the narrative’s ferocious urgency, Engel gradually discloses a few of Eve’s own guilty secrets—on the way to some gut-wrenching final revelations. This rural noir stakes Engel’s claim to that dystopian terrain somewhere between Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects and Daniel Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone. Agent: Jodi Reamer, Writers House.

February 1, 2020
A bleak drama of rural America that offers grim lessons but minimal hope. In a small-town park, Izzy and Junie, two 12-year-old girls, meet a grisly end. Junie's fading consciousness sheds no light on the murderer's identity. This is Engel's second adult novel (after The Roanoke Girls, 2017) to unfold in a meth-ridden, dying town. The setting is somewhere in Missouri, but this could be any American town, in any area left behind by the concentration of wealth and the exodus of youth. In towns like the aptly christened Barren Springs, many young people never make it out, and Junie's single mother, Eve Taggert, is one of these. The deck is stacked against Eve and her brother, Cal, from birth--in a trailer in a remote "holler" to a drug-addicted mother who starves them, abuses them, but manages to instill in them fierce family loyalty and an implacable eye-for-an-eye mentality. Now in their 30s, Cal and Eve have succeeded up to a point: Each has a small apartment in town; Cal is a cop, and Eve works as a waitress. Thanks to Eve's efforts, Junie had a modicum of a normal life and a best friend, Izzy, daughter of Zach and Jenny, who by Barren Springs standards are middle class. Through a fog of grief, Eve vows to find the killer and begins tracking the short list of suspects. These include her violent ex-boyfriend, Jimmy Ray, and his meth-cooking sidekick, strip club bartender Matt. An unforeshadowed revelation about Zach halfway through adds nothing to the suspense--instead, we are brought up short, wondering how a first-person narrator like Eve, blunt, plainspoken, and obsessed with the truth, could conceal this glaring fact from herself for half the book. In fact, her unerring instincts will lead to a completely unexpected conclusion. These pages are replete with lessons about the choices women have in such environments--that is to say, none, except to toughen up or give up. Readers craving some nod at redemption may have to be satisfied with rough justice.

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March 1, 2020

In the opening pages of this uncompromising and absorbingly written new novel by the author of The Roanoke Girls, 12-year-olds Junie and Izzie are murdered, and Engel does right by them, not using their tragedy as mere plot point to hook readers but genuinely letting us feel the rubbed-raw grief of Junie's mother, Eve Taggert, and showing how it turns swiftly into action. Eve was raised dirt poor by an abusive, meth-dealing mother and regrets never having made it out of her scrappy Missouri Ozarks town and given Junie a better life. But now she ignores warnings from her police officer brother and returns to her mother, for information and then for inspiration, because she'll need all her mother's plug-ugly toughness to untangle what she knows has to be a crime by a local. Along the way, we're unsettled by secrets from Eve's sordid run-in with the sheriff to Junie's paternity, but that's nothing compared to the gut-punch discovery of who wielded the knife. VERDICT Not just a fine thriller but a fine character study, plumbing family and particularly mother-daughter relationships and showing Eve, her mother, and Izzie's mother, too, as women unbendable as oak. [See Prepub Alert, 8/25/19.]--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from March 1, 2020
The only bright spot in single mother Eve Taggert's hardscrabble life is her 12-year-old daughter, Junie. Eve, who was raised by an alcoholic, abusive mother in a childhood made bearable only with the help of her older brother, Cal, gave Junie the love that Eve, now a waitress in a diner, had longed for as a child. So when Cal, now a cop in their small town of Barren Springs in the Missouri Ozarks, tells Eve that Junie and her best friend, Izzy Logan, have been murdered at the local playground, Eve is both bereft and furious, aching for vengeance against the person who inflicted this loss and embarking on her own investigation. Secrets are gradually revealed: Junie's hidden notebook describes Izzy's crush on an older man, and the long-hidden identity of Junie's father becomes known, as Eve uses all of her contacts to ferret out the motive and the murderer. Engel, author of The Roanoke Girls (2017), masterfully creates a milieu in which women struggle against all odds to provide the best lives possible for their daughters. Tension arises as Eve, heeding advice from her former boyfriend, an abusive meth dealer, is faced with a dreadful choice in a stunning conclusion.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)