On Halloween, a group of teenage students meet in the woods near Sally in the Wood, a road steeped in local lore and rumored to be haunted by the ghost of a murdered girl. By the end of the night, one student will be dead.
Teenagers from an exclusive boarding school, a deep dark English wood, myths of haunting, rituals and rumours, and Halloween combine in ONE DARK NIGHT to create a creepy, claustrophobic thriller that's steeped in family and community simmering tensions.
The story is told from three main viewpoints: School Counsellor Rachel, her ex-husband DC Ben Chase, and their rebellious teen daughter Ellie. Rachel works at Folly View College, an exclusive upmarket boarding school, is very recently divorced from Chase, who has a new girlfriend which is causing quite a bit of tension with Rachel and the fallout isn't helping teenager Ellie who is rebelling against her parents and the world in general.
The discovery of the body of one of Ellie's school friends, battered and broken at the bottom of a stone folly deep in the woods where the students were partying on Halloween doesn't help the family dynamic as Ellie's parents come to realise she's been keeping a lot of secrets from them, and Chase's investigation is complicated by the involvement of his fractured family in the school, and the group of teenagers who are integral to explaining what happened that night.
Tension then, a lot of of it of the domestic variety, a lot of it revolving around the school with a creepy caretaker and handsome art teacher to add to the mix and a bully and a troubled homeless recluse at the fringes. The storyline here is bolstered considerably by the creepy sense of place, creating an atmosphere that infects everything and everybody, well supported by a sense of pace that never quite allows the reader to settle, always pushing, always keeping the pieces of the plot moving deftly around the storyboard.
Whilst the mystery itself is well served by ONE DARK NIGHT, upon reflection, it's the underlying messages that have the most potency, not just that bullying and gaslighting exist, but how the online world can be used as a toolkit to find the vulnerable, hone the targeting, and manipulate the unaware and unwary.
One Dark Night
One night in the woods
A party gone wrong
A body discovered at sunrise
He murdered her at the folly on their wedding day, left her body for the crows. They say she haunts the woods now, a girl in a white dress …
Everyone in the small town of Thorncombe knows the tales of the haunted woods where the birds don’t sing and a girl in a white dress roams, luring people to their deaths. But when a girl in white is found dead the morning after Halloween, her body carefully arranged at the bottom of an old stone folly, the community is thrown into turmoil.
Local police detective Ben Chase is assigned to the murder investigation, but when the victim is identified as a student from his daughter’s school, tensions rise.
Was she the victim of a party prank gone wrong, or does the girl’s death represent something more sinister and ritualistic? As the investigation unfolds and the noose tightens around Chase’s own family, the only thing anyone can be sure of is that no one is safe until this violent killer is caught …
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