disinclined's Full Review: Gillian Flynn - Dark Places
There’s a time and a place for everything, and when the weather gets cold and wet and grey, it is clearly time for what millinocket calls the Bloody Knife novel: creepy and shadowy, suspenseful and murdery, the kind of book that keeps you up until two in the morning finishing it – and then makes you jump at every tiny sound in the unnaturally quiet house. Gillian Flynn’s second novel, Dark Places, succeeds brilliantly and gorily at all these endeavors. If you're a fan of "Dexter," you're pretty much guaranteed to love this.
The only survivor of a horrific mass murder that killed her mother and two sisters, Libby Day is a surly, misanthropic recluse with a touch of kleptomania. Yet she remains an object of fascination to a fringe subculture devoted to researching – and attempting to solve – famous unsolved serial-murder cases; after all, it was seven-year-old Libby’s testimony that pinned the killings on her fifteen-year-old brother, Ben, and sent him to jail for life. When the trust fund established by well-meaning donors during the trial finally runs dry, Libby realizes there’s money to be made by exploiting her tragedy: making appearances, selling family ephemera, questioning people who were close to the case for tidbits of new information. But once she begins investigating – and learns that it’s widely believed that Ben was falsely convicted – Libby discovers that she actually cares about digging up the truth, come what may. After all, what does she have left to lose?
Granted, Flynn’s second novel has a lot in common with her award-winning first: a badly damaged adult female survivor, a horrific murder, a reluctant investigation that develops into an obsession, a quirky but stalwart male sidekick. But what of it? Flynn knows her niche and does it well. She deserves honors solely for her masterful use of flashbacks, achieving the difficult task of keeping several narrators’ accounts, past and present, distinct and easy to understand. Another impressive trick: creating a fully believable, convincingly unlikable protagonist whose mental workings and bitter, self-loathing humor are nonetheless fascinating.
No suspense/thriller would be complete without a good and shocking final reveal, and the plot twist to this story is both surprising and satisfying. I admit that I’m not great at seeing twists coming (so when I guess the ending, you know it’s really bad), but other reviewers and commenters have agreed that this one’s a doozy, so I don’t feel bad for having no idea what was going on until the very end. Sometimes it’s okay to see a “surprise” coming, as long as you enjoy the process of getting there, but I can almost guarantee you won’t figure this one out until the final pages. I read this book in one day – almost in one sitting – because I couldn’t wait to find out what happened.
When the weather’s dark and dreary, your recreational reading should be, too! Brew up a cup of your favorite hot beverage, curl up on the couch with a blanket, and prepare for some seriously creepy page-turning thrills.
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