Kindle Price: | $13.99 |
Sold by: | Random House LLC Price set by seller. |
Your Memberships & Subscriptions
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
OK
Audible sample Sample
When the Stars Go Dark: A Novel Kindle Edition
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY MARIE CLAIRE • “The kind of heart-pounding conclusion that thriller fans crave . . . In the end, a book full of darkness lands with a message of hope.”—The New York Times Book Review
“This mystery will keep you guessing, and stay with you long after you finish. Dive in.”—Daily Skimm
Anna Hart is a seasoned missing persons detective in San Francisco with far too much knowledge of the darkest side of human nature. When tragedy strikes her personal life, Anna, desperate and numb, flees to the Northern California village of Mendocino to grieve. She lived there as a child with her beloved foster parents, and now she believes it might be the only place left for her. Yet the day she arrives, she learns that a local teenage girl has gone missing.
The crime feels frighteningly reminiscent of the most crucial time in Anna’s childhood, when the unsolved murder of a young girl touched Mendocino and changed the community forever. As past and present collide, Anna realizes that she has been led to this moment. The most difficult lessons of her life have given her insight into how victims come into contact with violent predators. As Anna becomes obsessed with saving the missing girl, she must accept that true courage means getting out of her own way and learning to let others in.
Weaving together actual cases of missing persons, trauma theory, and a hint of the metaphysical, this propulsive and deeply affecting novel tells a story of fate, necessary redemption, and what it takes, when the worst happens, to reclaim our lives—and our faith in one another.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBallantine Books
- Publication dateApril 13, 2021
- File size7532 KB
Customers who bought this item also bought
- “The people we love never leave us, Anna. You know that already. That’s what I mean by spirit. I mean love.”Highlighted by 509 Kindle readers
- What is all the suffering for if not so we can see how alike we are, and not alone? Where will the mercy come from, if not from us?Highlighted by 453 Kindle readers
- “Because everyone wants to be looked for, whether they realize it or not.”Highlighted by 411 Kindle readers
From the Publisher
|
|
|
---|---|---|
|
|
|
Editorial Reviews
Review
“Fueled by pure high anxiety . . . When the Stars Go Dark is an atmospheric and intricately plotted suspense novel.”—The Washington Post
“This mystery will keep you guessing, and stay with you long after you finish. Dive in.”—theSkimm
“A total departure for the author of The Paris Wife, McLain’s emotionally intense and exceptionally well-written thriller entwines its fictional crime with real cases.”—People, “Book of the Week”
“The twisty plot keeps the pages flying, and Paula McLain’s lyrical and poetic prose reveals insight after insight about the human heart, making this riveting read not only an engrossing psychological thriller, but crime fiction of the highest order.”—Lisa Scottoline, author of Someone Knows
“When the Stars Go Dark is a beautifully written, sharply observed literary thriller with an extraordinary, unforgettable heroine. An unflinching look at the long shadow cast by trauma and the resilience it takes to survive, this is a novel of both great sadness and great beauty.”—Kristin Hannah, author of The Four Winds
“Paula McLain has created a vulnerable, intelligent, unforgettable protagonist whose interior life is as interesting as the mysteries she has to solve. When the Stars Go Dark is my favorite kind of book. I’ll recommend it far and wide.”—Liz Moore, author of Long Bright River
“Lyrical and beautiful . . . a riveting deep dive into trauma, survival, and obsession. With her deeply flawed and utterly compelling heroine, elegant prose, and layered, twisting story, Paula McLain has penned an extraordinary novel of literary suspense, as gripping as it is unique and unforgettable.”—Lisa Unger, author of Confessions on the 7:45
“With this breathtaking novel, Paula McLain proves she can do anything. Exquisitely written, immersive, and atmospheric, When the Stars Go Dark is a tour de force of literary suspense.”—Christina Baker Kline, author of The Exiles
“Paula McLain, already established as the master of the historical novel, now explodes into crime fiction with a richly satisfying, tremendously moving mystery—haunting, poignant, lyrical, urgent.”—Chris Pavone, author of The Paris Diversion
“Fantastically propulsive and deeply atmospheric, this novel grabs you from the very first page. Paula McLain has proven to be a masterful storyteller no matter the genre.”—Aimee Molloy, author of The Perfect Mother
“This melancholy but gripping tale uses backstory and flashbacks to propel the mystery forward. Part suspense, part self-discovery tale, this first attempt at crime fiction from historical fiction author McLain (The Paris Wife) is hard to resist. Fans of the author’s other works will not be disappointed.”—Library Journal
“[A] stunning crime novel . . . McLain matches poetic prose with deep characterizations as she shines a light on the kindness in her characters’ souls. Fans of literary suspense won’t be able to put this one down.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The night feels shredded as I leave the city, through perforated mist, a crumbling September sky. Behind me, Potrero Hill is a stretch of dead beach, all of San Francisco unconscious or oblivious. Above the cloud line, an eerie yellow sphere is rising. It’s the moon, gigantic and overstuffed, the color of lemonade. I can’t stop watching it roll higher and higher, saturated with brightness, like a wound. Or like a door lit entirely by pain.
No one is coming to save me. No one can save anyone, though once I believed differently. I believed all sorts of things, but now I see the only way forward is to begin with nothing, or whatever is less than nothing. I have myself and no one else. I have the road and the snaking mist. I have this tortured moon.
I drive until I stop seeing familiar landmarks, stop looking in my rearview to see if someone is following me. In Santa Rosa, the Travelodge is tucked behind a superstore parking lot, the whole swath of it empty and overlit, like a swimming pool at night with no one in it. When I ring the bell, the night manager makes a noise from a back room and then comes out cheerfully, wiping her hands on her bright cotton dress.
“How are you?” she asks. The world’s most innocuous question, impossible to answer.
“Fine.”
She holds out the registration card and a purple pen, the dimpled flesh under her arm unfurling like a wing. I feel her looking at my face, my hair. She watches my hands, reading upside down. “Anna Louise Hart. That’s sure a pretty name.”
“What?”
“Don’t you think so, baby?” Her voice has the Caribbean in it, a rich, warm slant that makes me think she calls everyone “baby,” even me.
It’s hard work not to flinch at her kindness, to stand in the greenish cast of the fluorescent bulb and write down the number of my license plate. To talk to her as if we’re just any two people anywhere, carrying on without a single sorrow.
She finally gives me my key, and I go to my room, shutting the door behind me with relief. Inside there’s a bed and a lamp and one of those oddly placed chairs no one ever sits in. Bad lighting flattens everything into dull rectangles, the tasteless carpet and plastic-looking bedspread, the curtains missing their hooks.
I set down my duffel in the center of the bed, take out my Glock 19 and tuck it under the stiff pillow, feeling reassured to have it nearby, as if it’s an old friend of mine. I suppose it is. Then I grab a change of clothes, and start the shower, taking care to avoid the mirror as I undress, except to look at my breasts, which have hardened into stones. The right is hot to the touch, with a blistered red mound surrounding the nipple. I run the water in the shower as hot as it will go and stand there, being burned alive, with no relief at all.
When I climb out, dripping, I hold a washcloth under the faucet before microwaving it, sodden, until it smokes. The heat feels volcanic as I press it hard against myself, singeing my hands as I bend double over the toilet bowl, still naked. The loose flesh around my waist feels as rubbery and soft against my arms as a deflated life raft.
With wet hair, I walk to the all-night drugstore, buying ACE bandages and a breast pump, ziplock bags, and a forty-ounce bottle of Mexican beer. They only have a hand pump in stock, awkward and time-consuming. Back in my room, the heavy outmoded television throws splayed shadows on the bare wall. I pump with the sound off on a Spanish soap opera, trying to distract myself from the ache of the suction. The actors make exaggerated movements and faces, confessing things to one another while I labor on one breast and then the other, filling the reservoir twice and then emptying the milk into the baggies I label 9/21/93.
I know I should flush it all, but I can’t make myself do it. Instead, I hold the bags for a long minute, registering their meaning before tucking them into the freezer of the small convenience unit and closing the door, and thinking only briefly about the housekeeper who will find them, or some roadstrung trucker looking for ice and feeling repulsed. The milk tells a whole sordid story, though I can’t imagine any stranger correctly guessing at the plot. I’m having a hard time understanding it myself, and I’m the main character; I’m writing it.
Just before dawn I wake feverish and take too many Advil, feeling my throat catch and burn around the capsules. A breaking-news banner is running across the bottom of the TV. forty-seven confirmed dead in big bayou, alabama. deadliest crash in amtrak history. Sometime in the middle of the night, a towboat on the Mobile River has gotten off course in heavy fog and driven a barge into the Big Bayou Canot Bridge, displacing the track by three feet. Eight minutes later, running right on schedule, the Amtrak Sunset Limited traveling from Los Angeles to Miami has slammed into the kink at seventy miles per hour, shearing off the first three cars, collapsing the bridge, and rupturing the fuel tank. Amtrak is citing negligence of the tugboat driver. Several crew members are missing, and recovery efforts are still underway. President Clinton is supposed to visit the site later today.
I click off the set, wishing that the rubbery red button on the remote could work to shut off everything, inside and out. Chaos and despair and senseless death. Trains hurtling toward kinks and gaps, everyone aboard sleeping and clueless. Tugboat captains on the wrong river at exactly the wrong moment.
Eight minutes, I want to scream. But who would hear me?
(two)
Once I worked a missing persons case, a boy we later found in pieces under his grandmother’s porch in Noe Valley, the grandmother on a creaking, peeling porch swing directly over his body when we pulled up. For months after, I couldn’t get her face out of my mind, the powdery folds of skin around her mouth, frosted pink lipstick painted just beyond her upper lip. The serenity in her watery blue eyes.
Her grandson, Jeremiah Price, was four. She had poisoned him first, so he wouldn’t remember the pain. “Remember” being her word, the first word in the story she was telling herself about what she’d felt she’d had to do. But the story had no center, not to anyone but her. When we took her confession, we asked her the same question over and over. Why did you kill him? She could never tell us why.
In my dim room at the Travelodge, a rotary phone sits on the cheap, scarred bedside table with instructions for dialing out and the rate of long-distance charges. Brendan picks up on the second ring, his voice slow and thick, as if it’s coming through concrete. I’ve woken him up. “Where are you?”
“Santa Rosa. I didn’t get far.”
“You should get some sleep. You sound awful.”
“Yeah.” I look down at my bare legs on the bedspread, feeling the Brillo pad scratchiness of the cheap fabric against my thighs. My T-shirt is damp and wadded, stuck with sweat to the back of my neck. I’ve wrapped my breasts in a tourniquet of bandages, and the pain, in spite of all the Advil, sends a pinging ache through me with each heartbeat, a ragged sort of echolocation. “I don’t know what to do. This is awful. Why are you punishing me?”
“I’m not, it’s just—” There’s a long, freighted pause as he weighs his words. “You have to figure some things out for yourself.”
“How am I supposed to do that?”
“I can’t help you.” He sounds defeated, stretched to the breaking point. I can picture him on the side of our bed in dawn light, his body hunched over the phone, one hand in his thick dark hair. “I’ve been trying, and I’m tired, you know?”
“Just let me come home. We can fix this.”
“How?” he asks breathily. “Some things aren’t fixable, Anna. Let’s just both take some time. This doesn’t have to be forever.”
Something in his tone makes me wonder, though. As if he’s cut the cord but is afraid to acknowledge it. Because he doesn’t know what I’ll do. “How much time are we talking? A week or a month? A year?”
“I don’t know.” His sigh is frayed. “I have a lot of thinking to do.”
On the bed next to me, my own hand looks waxy and stiff, like something that belongs on a mannequin in a shopping mall. I look away, fixing on a point on the wall. “Do you remember when we first got married? That trip we took?”
He’s quiet for a minute, and then says, “I remember.”
“We slept in the desert under that huge cactus with all the birds living inside. You said it was a condominium.”
Another pause. “Yeah.” He isn’t sure where this is going, isn’t sure I haven’t lost it completely.
I’m not so sure myself. “That was one of our best days. I was really happy.”
“Yeah.” Through the phone his breathing quickens. “The thing is, I haven’t seen that woman in a long time, Anna. You haven’t been here for us and you know it.”
“I can do better. Let me try.”
Product details
- ASIN : B08F4FT48X
- Publisher : Ballantine Books (April 13, 2021)
- Publication date : April 13, 2021
- Language : English
- File size : 7532 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 385 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #143,354 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #248 in Psychological Literary Fiction
- #673 in Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Literary Fiction
- #5,002 in Women Sleuths (Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Paula McLain is the author of the the New York Times bestselling novels The Paris Wife, Circling the Sun, and Love and Ruin. Now she introduces When the Stars Go Dark, an atmospheric tale of intertwined destinies and heart-wrenching suspense. McLain was born in Fresno, California in 1965. After being abandoned by both parents, she and her two sisters became wards of the California Court System, moving in and out of various foster homes for the next fourteen years. When she aged out of the system, she supported herself by working as a nurses aid in a convalescent hospital, a pizza delivery girl, an auto-plant worker, a cocktail waitress--before discovering she could (and very much wanted to) write. She received her MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan in 1996, and is the author of two collections of poetry, a memoir, Like Family: Growing Up in Other People's Houses, and the debut novel, A Ticket to Ride. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, O: the Oprah Magazine, Good Housekeeping, Real Simple, Huffington Post, the Guardian and elsewhere. She lives with her family in Cleveland.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonReviews with images
-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
The writing is beautiful, and the research is very well done. This is a very different book from The Paris Wife, but Ms. McLain successfully proves that she can switch genres. Anna and Will, the lead sheriff on the case, are both dedicated but perhaps too intense, focusing on their cases in a way that excludes everything else. It's an excellent story that keeps you on the edge of your seat.
<b>SUMMARY</b>
Anna, after experiencing a traumatic loss, returns to the only place that ever felt like home, Mendocino, CA. Anna is a detective assigned to the most challenging missing persons cases but has recently lived through a personal tragedy which has caused a seemingly insurmountable rift with her husband. She had a difficult childhood but after finally being matched with loving foster parents Hap and Eden, she was able to live out the remainder of her childhood in Mendocino with them, as their beloved daughter.
When she arrives, she discovers there is a local fifteen year old girl, Cameron, missing. The missing girl brings back memories of another girl, Jenny, who went missing in Mendocino when Anna was a teenager. Jenny had been a close friend of Anna's, which left Anna with yet another heartache. Jenny's killer had never been found and the town had never recovered.
After spending a few days hiding from the world, Anna finally decides to offer to help with the search. It turns out that the sheriff is an old friend too. They share memories of Jenny's disappearance and the pain of her body being found, which further motivate their drive to find Cameron.
As the search for Cameron progresses, the reader learns about Jenny's disappearance, Cameron's past and all about Anna; her painful childhood, what brought her to Hap and Eden and the recent painful experience which brought her back to Mendocino. There is a lot packed into this plot! It became hard for me to do anything but read.
<b>WHAT I LOVED</b>
There was.so much to love, it had everything I love about a thriller; a very intense plot, characters with interesting backstories, a fast pace and a villain I wouldn't have suspected. There was even a dog and a psychic.
The setting was a huge part of what made the story so compelling. First of all, the location, Mendocino, a beautiful, heavily wooded area in Northern California would lend itself to hiding places in the woods where a kidnapping victim could be kept. And the time, early 1990's, before police and sheriff's had a shared database of crimes and suspects with other areas, where that sort of thing was only shared piecemeal. It allowed a serial criminal to change locations, continue committing crimes but avoid being detected because there was no pattern established from another area. Plus, the way the police began a search for a missing person was different then, now they would have immediately began looking at their social media and her computer etc. It took them days to find out about her personal life, where now it would have been minutes. Plus, in the 1990's, she would have had to meet her abductors in person, where now, it could be anyone anywhere on the internet.
Combine the area and the time frame, and the plot overlaps the real kidnapping and murder of Polly Klaus. Her real life kidnapping is woven into the story. Additionally, there were several cold cases fromright.1970's that the sheriff, William was investigating, considering the real world mention of Polly Klaus, I wondered if he would stumble upon missing persons cases related to the real life Golden State killer.There were so many real life facts, that I had to recheck the book description and be sure it was actually a fiction versus a memoir or true crime. So, as you can see, there was a lot more going on in the story besides just the main plot. So much for the reader to sink their teeth into.
<b>WHAT DIDN'T LOVE</b>
The story jumped back and forth in time between Anna's early childhood, teen years, the time just before she left for Mendocino and present tense. The shifts in the timeline not noted by a date so it could be confusing at times. I found myself often confused about which time period I was reading about.
<b>OVERALL</b>
This is my third Paula McLain, each of her books are so different and good in their own right; I am definitely a fan and will read her next one. I recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a good, suspense filled thriller.
Anna Hart is fraught with demons from a childhood of unfortunate circumstances, but stability arrived when loving foster parents gave her the guidance she needed. When they passed away and she moved on, she still had not processed previous loss and the hurt that befell her lingered.
Now back in Mendocino, grieving and in denial of sorts, she is caught up in a quiet search for a missing teenage girl, eerily reminiscent of a childhood story that occurred in town not so long ago. Anna is compelled to locate the girl and in doing so, she must get into the mind of the kidnapper. This forces her to confront fears that she would rather remain dormant.
What transpires is an unfolding of an incredibly brave, strong woman who, although she has suffered, knows she can put this to good use, to hopefully, help others.
McLain has interspersed actual accounts of recognizable missing persons, making the story that much more convincing and compelling. If you’ve read the author’s heartbreaking account of her own life, along with her sisters, in her memoir LIKE FAMILY: GROWING UP IN OTHER PEOPLE’S HOUSES, of being jostled around the foster care system and subjected to emotional and sexual abuse, WHEN THE STARS GO DARK holds that much more significance and an impact of this soulful exploration of a woman determined to make things right. For as many young girls as she can.
While it is a riveting, suspenseful novel, showing the harshness of crime, it is also compassionate, filled with the emotion of the people who care, the helpers, and the coming together of a community in the darkest hours.