Review: Somewhere in the Dark

Somewhere in the Dark by R.J. Jacobs
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

My Grandfather was big on mysteries. Of course, he was of the generation raised on radio which can act as a gateway drug to the genre. Mystery and Crime novels were usually what I found him reading with the occasional random genre thrown in. My mother mainly read science fiction and fantasy which is what I was mainly brought up on. I branch out and hop around to all different forms of literature nowadays and this book can be counted as one of the reasons I don't dismiss something just because it isn't my 'norm.'

It was great! I do have to say that I did figure out who did it right in the beginning, which is one of the reasons I can't give this a perfect five stars. I do like being right, but it takes a bit of the fun out of it when you can solve the mystery and have to wait around for the characters to catch up with you. Now, is that the fault of R.J. Jacobs? Not at all. Even with books that aren't mysteries I've noticed I'm beginning to realize where stories are going and how plots are going to play out. It comes from being a big reader. So I don't fault the author at all and honestly there were a few moments in the book where I thought "Wait a minute, is he seriously going to blindside me and actually make this person the killer instead? Am I completely wrong?" It would've been a killer twist.

It takes awhile for the story to get set up. Our main character has a lot of history that we have to get through before we enter into the thick of things. At first the constant flashbacks bothered me but then I realized it was setting me up for the rest of the book. They were there for a reason. I can't tell you how many times I've been annoyed by writers including flashbacks or walls of text to flesh out a character just to fill pages. Everything in this book is written because we need to know it. For a mystery, every detail counts.

At one point our main character finds herself imprisoned while they try to figure out if she's guilty or not of the crime. It made me uncomfortable because seven years ago I was falsely accused of a crime where I actually spent two weeks in prison before I was released and proven innocent. This book brought back a lot of memories from that. I'm surprised Mr. Jacobs was able to accurately portray what it felt like. He gave Jessie the right voice.

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