When The Stars Go Dark by Paula McLain
Publisher: Random House / Ballantine Books
Publication Date: April 13, 2021
Format: Hardcover - 370 pages
Paperback - 400 pages
Kindle - 387 pages / 7.0 MB
Audiobook - 11 Hours 29 Minutes
Nook - 400 pages / 6 MB
ISBN (Hardcover): 978-0861540808
ISBN (Paperback): 978-0593237915
ASIN (Kindle): B08F4FT48X
ASIN (Audible): B08GCVK1SS
BNID (Nook): 978-0593237908
Genre: Thriller
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Disclaimer: I received a copy of the book via NetGalley. I also purchased a hardcover copy from my monthly Book Of The Month (BOTM) subscription. This book review is from my personal honest opinion.
Book Description:
Anna Hart is a missing persons detective in San Francisco. When tragedy strikes her personal life, Anna, desperate and numb, flees to the Northern California village of Mendocino to grieve. She lived there as a child with her beloved foster parents, and now she believes it might be the only place left for her. Yet the day she arrives, she learns a local teenage girl has gone missing. The crime feels frighteningly reminiscent of the most crucial time in Anna's childhood, when the unsolved murder of a young girl touched Mendocino and changed the community forever.
As past and present collide, Anna realizes that she has been led to this moment. The most difficult lessons of her life have given her insight into how victims come into contact with violent predators. As Anna becomes obsessed with the missing girl, she must accept that true courage means getting out of her own way and learning to let others in.
Weaving together actual cases of missing persons, trauma theory, and a hint of the metaphysical, this propulsive and deeply affecting novel tells a story of fate, necessary redemption, and what it takes, when the worst happens, to reclaim our lives--and our faith in one another.
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Paris Wife comes a novel of intertwined destinies and heart-wrenching suspense: A detective hiding away from the world. A series of disappearances that reach into her past. Can solving them help her heal?
My Book Review:
In When The Stars Go Dark, author Paula McLain weaves a riveting thriller that easily draws the reader into a dark storyline that follows a woman's journey to heal herself after a personal tragedy.
San Francisco missing persons detective Anna Hart has been haunted by past trauma in her life, and when a personal tragedy occurs in her family, she goes back to her childhood hometown of Mendocino, California to figure things out, find herself, and heal. But once she is in Mendocino, she can't help but fall back into what she knows best, living and breathing missing person cases, and helps out her childhood friend, Sheriff Will Flood, with a series of missing persons cases and murders in Mendocino. Can Anna help solve the missing person cases while also healing and finding her way back home to her family?
When The Stars Go Dark is a complex and multi-layered tale that is rich in detail and vivid descriptions. It has intriguing and suspenseful twists and turns into the missing persons cases, while intertwining it with flashbacks to Anna's troubled past. As Anna's story slowly unfolds, the author keeps the reader guessing, and with no other option than to keep turning the pages to find out what happens next. The dark intensity of the storyline and the complexity of Anna's troubled past kept me thoroughly riveted, engrossed, and guessing if she could really help solve the missing person cases while trying to heal herself.
The author does a phenomenal job of delving into a haunting and very disturbing storyline that was really tough to read. The author transports the reader into this fast-paced white-knuckle storyline with her creative interweaving of a woman's troubled past intertwined with tragic missing persons and murder cases that leaves the reader trying to keep up with where the story will lead them until the surprising conclusion. I would be remiss if I didn't mention that the author interwove the true crime abduction / murder case of Polly Klass in 1993 with the fictional missing person cases that Anna worked on throughout the story.
When The Stars Go Dark is one heck of a slow-building thriller, it just doesn't get any better than that!
RATING: 5 STARS
About The Author
Paula McLain is the author of the New York Times and internationally bestselling novels, The Paris Wife, Circling the Sun and Love and Ruin. Her latest instant bestseller is, When the Stars Go Dark. Her latest novel is Skylark, which was published on 1/6/26. She received an MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan in 1996 and is also the author of two collections of poetry, the memoir Like Family: Growing Up in Other People's Houses, and the debut novel, A Ticket to Ride. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Real Simple, Town & Country, The Guardian, Huffington Post, Good Housekeeping, and elsewhere. She lives with her family in Cleveland, Ohio.
