Bensington, Mass., the Boston bedroom suburb that was the scene of Andrew Coburn’s acclaimed thriller No Way Home, is the setting of this new novel of thumbscrew suspense, explosive sex, and shattering revelation. Once again police chief James Morgan takes center stage—this time to delve into the deaths of two young people that rip the surface of the artificially idyllic community where people play by their own desperately driven and dangerous rules.
When the corpse of sixteen-year-old Glen Bodine is found, the death seems a tragic accident—or else an all-too-possible suicide. Murder is out of the question, for this is a town of nice people, pretty manners, and piles of money. But when an eccentric grafter declares himself a child killer, not only Glen’s death but another, even more mysterious one buried in the past must be put under searching scrutiny. The results expose a viper’s nest of twisted hungers and terrifying secrets.
As James Morgan follows a twisting trail to the unexpected truth that bares the underside of relationships and marriages, and reveals treacheries within families, he himself is torn between cool professionalism and hot carnal passion to possess a beautiful married woman he knows he should not touch. But he is not the only one impaled on horns of desire. A woman painter finds herself going to bed with a man she fruitlessly tries to despise. A wife in a “perfect marriage” finds she has been “sleeping with the devil.” Another chooses a sexual route to wreak revenge on her staid husband and devastatingly seductive stepson, while the most loving wife in the group is targeted by a brilliant, rich, and ruthless tycoon who, as always, gets what he wants—whether in the boardroom or the bedroom.
Andrew Coburn reaffirms his position as a novelist who has taken the crime thriller to new heights of storytelling suspense and new depths of insight and compassion as he weaves a spellbinding tale out of the sins men and women commit and the veil they do to each other and themselves. Unfolding with nerve-crackling tension, Voices in the Dark will have you reading far into the night to unravel a tangle of intertwined lives, lusts, and lies and to discover how fragile is the seam that separates guilt from innocence, how deadly the line that separates love from hate.
