Book Review: Darkness All Around by Doug Magee

Arti­cle first pub­lished as Book Review: Dark­ness All Around by Doug Magee on Blog­crit­ics.

About:
Dark­ness All Around by Doug Magee is a mys­tery novel tak­ing place in a small town. Besides the mys­tery which the story cen­ters around, the book also cap­tures the neu­ro­sis feel of small town pol­i­tics.

The pub­lisher is giv­ing away one copy of this book— use the Raf­fle­copter form at the end of the post to enter.

• 352 pages
• Pub­lisher: Touch­stone (Octo­ber 18, 2011)
• Lan­guage: English
• ISBN-10: 1439154023

Thoughts:
Dark­ness All Around (web­site | Face­book) by Doug Magee (author web­site) is a dif­fer­ent kind of thriller which will keep you guess­ing until the end. The book would make a great selec­tion for a book club because of all that’s hap­pen­ing, not only in the mys­tery arena, but also the psy­chol­ogy of the char­ac­ters, their rela­tion­ships and how they han­dle the chal­lenges which con­stantly come up.

The pace of the book changes often, some­times it’s slow, the oth­ers light­ning fast but the nar­ra­tive kept up my inter­est regard­less. Parts of the novel has an almost small-town claus­tro­pho­bic feel to them, grow­ing up in small towns and places where every­one knows your busi­ness within a few moments, I can appre­ci­ate the notion.

The one issue I did have with the book was… with the phys­i­cal book, not with the writ­ing, the char­ac­ter­i­za­tion, nar­ra­tive or any­thing else, but with the phys­i­cal copy. As I was read­ing, the book lit­er­ally fell apart in my hands. This was not an ARC but a fin­ished paper­back, luck­ily I got the book from the pub­lisher, oth­er­wise it would have gone back to the store.

As a bib­lio­phile this both­ers me very much. I believe that the future of of pub­lish­ing is in two are­nas, eBooks and high qual­ity phys­i­cal books. I do not want to see phys­i­cal book go away, I want to see phys­i­cal books become some­thing peo­ple would cher­ish as in years of yore. An object of affec­tion being passed down gen­er­a­tion after generation.

So tell me, what do you think the future of paper books is?

Syn­op­sis:
Eleven years after Risa’s best friend was mur­dered, her hus­band Sean comes back to town claim­ing he is the mur­derer. He was con­sid­ered dead and the mur­derer has been caught, but such small details don’t stop Sean from try­ing to prove his guilt.

The small Penn­syl­va­nia town is set ablaze when vio­lent forces react to Sean’s out­ra­geous claims and mys­te­ri­ous return. Risa thinks some­thing is not right with Sean’s claim, but she is will­ing to help him out but doesn’t real­ize the price she might have to pay.

BOOK BLOGGERS — Have you read Dark­ness All Around? If so link up your review below:

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CJO

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