Dark Places

hen I was a kid, we had these yellow plates that my dad loved.  They had a small, inner circle of white containing two crossed wheat stalks at their centers, but other than that, the plates were this solid, worn-looking pale yellow hue.  They might have been relics from an old garage sale, or maybe they were the survivors from a Kmart set he bought in undergrad; there were only two or three of them in all.

One night when washing dishes my brother dropped one of these plates and chipped a fingernail-sized crescent of ceramic (or whatever they were made of) off of the plate’s edge.  It was aesthetically ruined, if still functional.  We couldn’t use it when company came over.  In fact, no one really used it at all after that except my dad, who–due to the its worn, warm, good-find-at-a-salvation-army quality–couldn’t bear to throw it out.

It’s the memory of washing that dish–beloved, broken–and running my fingers over the chip that haunted me while I read Chicago author Gillian Flynn’s Great Lakes Book Award nominated novel Dark Places.

Everything about this book evokes a certain darkness, a certain level of poverty, a certain amount of identity associated with everyday objects.  It’s like the chip:  always course and sandy under the pads of my fingers, the lip still razor sharp.  Flynn has perfected the mastery of roping a reader into her writing with every gritty, sharp-worn detail she writes.  There is no excess in this book, no fat that needs to be trimmed.

If you’re looking for a fantastic murder mystery to add to your early summer reading list, you’ve found it.  Dark Places focuses on the Day family, or rather its two surviving members:  Libby, who was a child when her two sisters and mother were brutally murdered in the middle of the night, and Ben, her older brother, who was convicted of stabbing, shooting, and chopping them to death with an axe.  The book follows Libby as an adult as she attempts to unwrap the mystery that still shrouds her mother and sisters’ deaths.

This book is raw, dirty, and suspenseful.  It’s filled with a cast of characters that you probably won’t like, but won’t be able to get away from.  Like my dad’s plate, they’re not nice or pretty; they’re irresistible.  From the first page, I found everything about this novel to be tantalizingly inescapable.  Flynn hits it out of the park with this one.  You should read it.