In The Dark

by Cara Hunter

The story begins with a chilling discovery in an upscale Oxford neighbourhood. A woman is found imprisoned behind a wall in a windowless basement, along with a child who appears to be about two years old. Police don’t know who the woman is: she seems unable to speak, and they can’t find any record of a missing woman matching her description. The house is owned by an elderly man, a former professor seemingly suffering from dementia; he claims he knows nothing about her.

This seems like a familiar, though horrifying, story, one we’ve encountered before, in the novel Room and in the true story of a German man who imprisoned his own daughter and had seven children with her.

But some things don’t ring true to Detective Inspector Adam Fawley or his team. Could the house owner really be her captor? If not, who else could it be? Someone has clearly been bringing them food and water, though the supplies were nearly gone.

Then DI Fawley notices something odd. Directly behind the house in question, sharing a back fence, is another house that he knows from a previous investigation: two years ago, a young mother and journalist who lived there disappeared and was never found. Could this be her — could she be the mute woman imprisoned in the basement?

But it’s not that simple. Investigating a back shed, the police find a woman’s partially mummified body under the floor. This proves to be that of the long-missing journalist; she clearly was murdered and her body hidden. So police still don’t know who the woman in the basement is, who imprisoned her, or who fathered her child. Are the two cases connected, or is it a coincidence that they happened in such close proximity?

The story gets more complicated from there: nothing is as it seems. Hunter is known for complex plots with many surprises and twists, and that is certainly the case with this novel, with a final twist on the very last page. This one kept me reading long into the night.

In The Dark is the second in Hunter’s popular series featuring Oxford DI Adam Fawley. There are now seven novels in the series: the most recent, Making a Killing, is available in the UK and will be released in the US in May 2025.

Growing up, there weren’t a lot of books in Hunter’s family home, but weekly visits to the library fuelled her lifelong love of reading — which ultimately led her to Oxford University, where she completed an English literature degree in the 1980s.  She then moved to London for fifteen years, where she worked in public relations and as a freelance copywriter. She says these jobs gave her a lot of useful experience as well as a healthy respect for meeting deadlines. In 2003, she returned to Oxford for a PhD. 

She’s long been a fan of crime fiction and TV crime programs such as CSI or Broadchurch. On vacation with her husband, she threw a paperback thriller down because she found its ending disappointing. Her husband suggested that she write one herself, and by the time they returned home, she had written a rough synopsis for a novel. That eventually became Close to Home, the first in her police procedural series featuring DI Adam Fawley, which was published in 2017 and was shortlisted for Crime Book of the Year in the British Book Awards. Her third novel, No Way Out, was selected by the Sunday Times as one of the 100 best crime novels published since 1945. Nearly two million Fawley novels have now been sold in 30 languages across the world.

Cara and her husband live in Oxford with their cat.

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