Onyx reviews: The Dark Corners of the Night by Meg Gardiner

Reviewed by Bev Vincent, 01/06/2020

It's December in Los Angeles, and a serial killer is terrifying the city. He attacks families who live in houses without security systems. His M.O. is the same in each incident: he breaks into suburban homes in the middle of the night, shoots the father first, then the mother. After that, he goes into the children's rooms. He doesn't kill them, but here there are signs that he is escalating. In each incident, he goes a little farther in terrorizing the newly orphaned kids. He leaves cryptic messages behind that point to a disturbed, deranged psychology, including eyes drawn in blood. The media adopts the name he assigns to himself: the Midnight Man.

FBI profiler Caitlin Hendrix is assigned to assist the local police in identifying the individual behind this reign of terror. With several incidents to work from, she and her partner debate the type of personality disorder that would lead someone to behave this way. Unlike on shows like Criminal Minds, where the profile is presented as a fait accompli, Gardiner shows the thought process behind the development of the profile. The only problem is that this killer isn't easily pigeon-holed. If Hendrix and her team get it wrong, they may send the police looking for the wrong kind of person, hindering the investigation rather than helping it.

As the holiday season approaches, the killer shows no signs he intends to slow down or stop. The forensic measures he takes to obscure his identity point to someone with intimate knowledge of police procedures. Hendrix tentatively suggests the killer might be a family member of a police officer, which doesn't go down well with the cops in the task force. Then a young witness, who interrupts the killer attempting his next blitz murder, supplies information that shows her they may have the profile completely wrong, and the implications are stunning. She is so disturbed that she reverts to some of her previous bad habits to attempt to exorcise her anguish.

Once the killer is identified, using geographic profiling to limit the potential candidate pool, the hunt is on, and the book shifts from a whodunit to a cat-and-mouse pursuit. In one extended scene, numerous law enforcement agencies join in a car chase through the city. These scenes are generally exciting in movies and television, but rarely are they as well orchestrated on the page as Gardiner manages here. She juggles several perspectives and manages to keep readers oriented as the killer tacks and backtracks and attempts to throw off his pursuers. Similarly, the final confrontation, waged in an incomplete high-rise building, is the very definition of thrilling.

In this, the third novel in the UNSUB series, elements from the previous novels persist, although without a great deal of advancement. Hendrix's long-distance boyfriend, Sean, who works with the ATF, is mostly off-screen as he pursues the bomber who nearly killed his ex-wife in a hospital bombing (Into the Black Nowhere). The Ghost, the erstwhile partner of the Prophet (Unsub), is mentioned from time to time, but this killer with a vendetta against Hendrix isn't an obvious threat at the moment.