Book - The Darker Side

TitleThe Darker Side -
Author - Cody McFadyen
genre, mystery, suspense


When I read the first in this series I wasn’t too convinced. He tried too hard to make it salacious and graphically violent. The second was a bit better but this third one, he really gets it right. Smokey Barret and her team have returned when the FBI get called in to investigate the death of Lisa Reid who is the transgendered son of a congressman and the twist? She’s killed on board a plane and someone has put a crucifix into her side with number in the one hundreds. A death count maybe and if so, the highest anyone has ever seen for a modern serial killer.
Naturally more bodies do show up and a pattern emerges that takes us to the Catholic Church and the confessional. Then the killer starts ‘you tubing’ his kills and why he’s doing it (they haven’t confessed their darkest secrets to God). He’s been at this for decades, his first kills being recorded on super 8 and VHS. He begins taunting Smokey’s team and she notices something, for someone concerned with punishing the guilty he’s only killing women.

As a counterpoint to all this we have Callie’s impending wedding, Smokey’s lover telling her he loves her and Smokey’s adoptive daughter, who has been horrible mentally scarred, deciding she’s healed enough to go to regular school and oh, Kirby the CIA assassin functioning as wedding planner to lighten up an otherwise very grim story. Unfortunately with Kirby is the one place the novel does slip into salacious violence that it could have done without (especially given her superwoman background what happens isn’t that believable) Still, overall it’s the best so far.