Imani Banks is a therapist in Brooklyn Heights during the isolating pandemic that shut down the city. She is also the wife of award-winning restaurateur Philip, mother to two private school kids, and best friend of Melissa, who is missing.
Melissa’s husband Nate was found shot in their home, with Melissa nowhere to be found. Their daughter Ava had been at school when the news broke of Nate’s death, and the school called the person Melissa had listed as an emergency contact, Imani.
It seems that the police right away are thinking that Melissa had shot her husband and disappeared, Imani knew that she would never leave Ava behind like that. She was convinced that her friend was in mortal danger, no matter what the detectives said.
Tonya Sayre is a single mother working at Philip’s restaurant. She heads home after a long shift trying to serve customers in the heated igloos that allowed customers to eat outside, at an actual restaurant, even with the cold still blowing in around them. But when Philip decides to close the restaurant to diners and switch to takeout only, Tanya is out of a job.
When she goes back to her apartment, her landlord tells her that she is two months behind in her rent. Tanya insists that there must be a problem with the bank. She hadn’t realized because the deposits were automatic, as were her rent payments. But when she checks with the bank, she finds out that her automatic deposits had not gone in for two months.
Tanya calls the attorney that handled setting up the account that was to provide a safe home for her daughter. The attorney tells her that the man’s wife had found out about the account and shut down the payments, and he was doing what he could to restore it. But that doesn’t keep Tanya’s landlord from kicking her out, despite the city’s moratorium on evictions. When she has nowhere to go, she talks to Philip to see if he can help.
Philip wants to help her out, so he offers rooms in their home for Tanya and her daughter, and he lets her pay off the first month by cleaning the restaurant. After that, her unemployment checks can help. Tanya agrees, because she has nowhere else to go. But she can tell right away that Imani wasn’t included in his decision and is wary of moving strangers in to their home.
Meanwhile, Imani is still trying to figure out what could have happened to Melissa and where she might be. She does some investigating and starts to uncover secrets about Nate that make her question how well she really knew him. But as it turns out, Nate wasn’t the only one with secrets. Tanya knows some things about the men in Imani’s life, and it turns out that Philip has kept some things from her as well. Will Imani be able to put the pieces together in time to save her best friend? And if she does, will everything she has built for her life come apart at the seams?
The Darkness of Others is a dark thriller written and set during the worst part of the pandemic. The shutdown of New York City makes this story feel claustrophobic, and the underlying anxiety of the masks and social distancing adds a level of fear to this thriller. Author Cate Holahan uses the darkness of the illness to mirror the darkness in some of the characters, and she uses the resolution of the crimes as a way for the characters to reevaluate their life choices and move into a different world as the pandemic starts to life.
I thought that The Darkness of Others was an interesting read. I struggled with it some, I think because of the pandemic as the background. Maybe I’m not as over those early days as I had thought I was, or maybe it’s the description of the murder scene, so graphic and so early in the book, that threw me off. But I stuck with it, and I was glad I did. The ending is lovely and fitting and brings it all to a better place for the characters who deserve that. It was a challenging ride to get there, but we got there. And as more time goes by, it will not only get easier to read about those pandemic days, it will be important to have books like this to remember and to teach others what those days were like (albeit without the murder, for most of us).
Egalleys for The Darkness of Others were provided by Grand Central Publishing through NetGalley, with many thanks.
