On Halloween, a group of teenage students meet in the woods near Sally in the Wood, a road steeped in local lore and rumored to be haunted by the ghost of a murdered girl. By the end of the night, one student will be dead.
Rachel, the school guidance counselor, is trying to keep a handle on her increasingly distant teenage daughter, Ellie, while students and parents panic and mourn. Her ex-husband and detective Ben, dealing with a personal crisis of his own, has concerns about his daughter’s safety as he investigates the death of one of her classmates. Meanwhile, Ellie is keeping secrets from both her parents, including one about where she was that night.
Told from multiple perspectives and with Hannah Richell’s distinct “atmospheric and ever-twisting” (Emylia Hall, author of the Shell House Detective Mysteries) prose, One Dark Night is a white-knuckled and suspenseful thriller about urban legends, privilege, and how the past continues to haunt us.
When I read the description of this book, I thought the plot would have more to do with the ghost that haunts the road known as Sally in the Wood, so I expected something spookier. What I got is more of a combination of domestic drama and whodunnit.
A party in the woods ends in death for one teen in a murder mystery told from multiple points of view.
Ellie has been withdrawn ever since her parents split up, but after that party, she is keeping even more secrets. What really happened that night, and why is there blood on her clothes? Her father Ben, is a detective investigating the murder, and her mother Rachel, is the school guidance counselor who in trying to deal with so many students, is missing some signs from her troubled daughter.
A lack of communication between Rachel and her ex-husband Ben felt contrived rather than natural, in order to keep those characters in the dark for longer than necessary, before they finally learn what the reader already knows from the start, that their daughter Ellie was at the party on the night of the murder.
While I was not the target audience for this book, and I did not care much for any of the characters, it did succeed in pulling the wool over my eyes in every attempt to guess who the murderer was, which led to a satisfying reveal at the end.
My thanks to Atria Books for the invitation to read an e-ARC
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