“A Step Past Darkness”

By Vera Kurian

 

Vera Kurian’s first novel “Never Saw Me Coming” was nominated for an Edgar Award for Best First Novel in 2022. Her follow up is even better with surprising twists which include a horror element, a dangerous cult, and a group of students who find out that secrets cannot always be kept.

 

The gripping danger stems from an incident in 1995 in a lovely, suburban town when a group of high school students decide to throw a party in an abandoned coal mine. Obviously, nothing can possibly go wrong with that idea!  But since humans seem to be very good at making terrible decisions, the party goes on and disaster ensues for six classmates who witness a shocking event that they keep secret for 20 years. They go so far as to agree to never speak of the crime that happened and to leave town and never speak to each other.

The six are Maddy, a devout member of the local megachurch; Kelly, the bookworm next door; James, a cynical burnout; Casey, a loveable football player; Padma, the shy straight-A student and Jia, who is starting to see visions she can’t explain. While 20 years have passed, Jia’s visions and the murder of Maddy drives Jia to break the pact by calling everyone originally involved back to Wesley Falls to end what is beginning to tear the town apart.

Much of the novel deals with the group of six teens. They are all well-developed characters and interact to each other in positive ways. Events from the 90s come up to orientate us to the time which this was taking place. Eventually they find that many of the town’s problems seem to swirl around the town’s megachurch called “Golden Praise.” The church has a dangerous cult-like hold on the citizens to the point that the church’s leaders are those townspeople with the most influence. Others in town who are not in the church are called burnouts. The elite high school girls are called the “Circle Girls” and wear necklaces with small gems that relate to a church hierarchy that Jia and her friends must uncover.

Many modern novels jump back and forth between characters and this novel does that with all six of its main characters as we get to know them as teens in the 90s. That takes up a lot of time and thus it takes a while to really jump into what is going on in the town itself. Once everyone is back in Wesley Falls, the novel jumps into high gear and becomes a top rate thriller. I love the idea of a coal mine being a major setting since I can really imagine that kids in the town would be intrigued with exploring something that they are told to stay away from. The social interactions of the residents of the town are of importance and controlled by the church’s influence. The book has many twists and turns and surprises. Just read it and don’t read the many reviews that I feel give away far too much. Just read this triller and enjoy the ride.

 

“Only If You’re Lucky”

by Stacy Willingham

It’s interesting that I managed to read two books in a row about friendship. Perhaps we all need to think about our friendships and what brings us to develop the friendships we have and what keeps those friendships healthy. I’m pretty sure that at some time in everyone’s life they develop a friendship that is unhealthy. A friendship that perhaps brings out the worst in us. That occurrence isn’t just about the other person. It’s about both people. Very often we try to heal our lives through others. We expect others to be our strength or to fill up the hole that loss or pain from childhood has left us with.  In the case of this book, Margot goes to college and replaces her dead friend from high school with a girl whose hold on her is life changing.

Margot is drawn to Lucy in what becomes an unhealthy and life altering friendship. The book goes back and forth between “before” and “after” a certain big event that everything is leading to. That event changes everyone and everything.

Margot starts out her college life as a shy, young, damaged girl from a small town only to meet Lucy who is always the center of attention, exciting, and dynamic. Margot becomes part of Lucy’s group of friends and ends up moving off campus with them in a rental house. While Lucy’s influence would probably be enough to change Margot’s life, the fraternity boys from the house next door complicate her life even more.

Margot finds herself changing. But there are things happening that keep her from totally embracing Lucy’s influence. Sometimes it seems that her past and present are coming together in disturbing ways. When a young man whom she suspected of injuring her dead high school best friend joins the freshman class at her college and moves next door, her life truly starts spinning out of control. The unhealthy relationships and holds the characters have on each other leads not just to pain for many of the characters, but to the death of some as well.

I love books that drive me to read as fast as possible to find out where the plot is going and what is the motivation behind the actions of each of the characters. This was a really fun and fascinating read.

Willingham has only written two other books, both good reads to go back to if you haven’t already read them. They are "A Flicker in the Dark" and "All the Dangerous Things."

The next book on my reading list is “A Step Past Darkness” by Vera Kurian.

 

 

Pretty Little Wife (2020)

The Replacement Wife (2021)

The Last Invitation (2022)

  

Darby Kane may not be destined to win a Pulitzer Prize for literature so don’t start reading her books with that expectation. (Although you never know.) What you can rely on when you read one of her books is that her books are just fun to read. Her domestic fiction is personal filled with betrayal by those who should love you the most and whom you should love without reservation. Anyone could be plotting against you from your wife to a husband, to family members, to friends. Many of her characters lack a moral compass to say the least. You may read her books and say this is too complex or too over the top and think that no one would act the way her characters act. At that point you turn on the news and some father just left his baby locked in a car while he went in to work for 8 hours. Or a women killed her kids because they were just too much trouble. Thousands of people gamble away their futures every day while living in a dream that they will get rich with this behavior. Let’s face it, people do crazy well in real life and Darby Kane does crazy well in her books (which is a lot less damaging).

The Engagement Party (2023)

I’ve read all of her books and enjoyed her form of domestic fiction with twisty plots and crazy actions. I hadn’t gotten around to her last book “The Engagement Party” and finally picked it up and got caught up in the crazy. Honestly who doesn’t know that when you go somewhere on vacation that only has one entrance and exit which is covered by water half the time that nothing good is going to come of that?

The vacation is organized as an engagement party where a group of old friends can get back together to celebrate one of their own getting engaged. The friends knew each other in college and experienced the horror of having on graduation weekend a student (Emily Hunt) go missing only to be found floating in a river. The police decide that the death was linked to another student who died by suicide and close the case.

Immediately you get the idea that these so-called friends are tied together by the secrets they have held and the lies they’ve told to hide those secrets since that incident in college. Even though 12 years have passed, the guilt and shame have not. It seems that more than one person wants this group to reveal the truth about Emily’s death and the trap is set on this isolated vacation hide out. Finding the truth isn’t easy and has to be forced out through threats, violence and death.

As tension ramps up in the book, the group finds a dead man in the trunk of a car with a note that says, “Time to tell the truth.” Of course, a storm covers the only road out with water leaving them stranded and wondering who will be the next to die and which one of them was driven to kill.

This book is just fun. There is a ton of tension and a constant desire to know exactly what is really going on. The characters are a mess of guilt and fear. They all have their own secrets and have told lies for so long that it seems impossible to tell the truth. On the surface, they see themselves as friends, but none of them really are friends.

There is no way the book couldn’t make you think about friendship and those we call friends. Many of our friends develop from shared experiences: we work together, we went to college together, we lived next door to each other, and so on. We may have a shared past, shared interests, shared experiences. We hope that our friends are people who love us and would have our backs in difficult times. Unfortunately, we have all been let down by friends and have let friends down. Friendship is complicated like all relationships. I would advise that if you have the kind of friends the people in this book have that you move across the county and block their number.

 

 What the Wife Knew (2024)

Darby Kane’s next book comes out December 10, 2024, and pre-pub reviews make it seem that this may be her best book so far.