That Darkness

That Darkness is Lisa Black’s eighth thriller and the first of a new series featuring Maggie Gardiner, a forensic investigator, and Detective Jack Renner who both work for the Cleveland Police Department.

Gardiner & Renner are strong believers in justice and tracking down the truth. The great strength of this novel is the moral dilemmas that this plunges them into after a girl’s body is discovered in a churchyard. She is not only unknown, but intriguingly, she has not been reported missing. Maggie and Jack are both assigned to the case, and yet they approach the investigation from different tracks and with different mind-sets. Both are determined to hunt down the monster behind this murder in the cause of justice, but they have vastly differing Modus Operandi.

The author is currently a latent print examiner in Florida and has previously spent five years as a forensic specialist in a morgue; so there is therefore heavy emphasis in the novel on crime-scene procedures, as well as the painstaking work that Maggie Gardiner puts into the horrific investigation, following the discovery of the girl’s body. Nevertheless both she and Jack Renner are interesting characters and the plot holds two extraordinary surprises, one of which is the conclusion of the novel. Though the novel dragged at times, due to the heavy emphasis placed on the forensic evidence, rather than characterisation; but the strength of the plot and its weaving narrative wins out in the end.