Dark Matter

September 3, 2012
Cain's unrelentingly dark follow-up to Cherry Beach Express, the first Steve Nastos mystery, finds the former Toronto cop quitting his dull work for an insurance company and teaming up with lawyer Kevin Carscadden in a bid to locate missing teenager Lindsay Bannerman. Lindsay and other young girls are being held captive from the story's opening, and their terrible plight and eventual fate is made clear when one of them is gruesomely slaughtered. But their captors, psychic Anthony Raines and his life partner, Chavez Vega Alvarez, really cross the line when they set their sights on someone close to Carscadden and Nastos. The duo shucks off the rules of fair play and goes for broke in a last ditch effort to rescue those still aliveâbefore it's too late. Cain ramps up the suspense to fever pitch and follows the exciting ending with an ambiguous dénouement that augurs another story.