The Familiar Dark by Amy Engel
Amy Engel’s The Familiar Dark (Dutton) begins in the darkness, in the final moments of the life of Junie Taggert, a twelve-year-old girl murdered alongside her best friend, Izzy, and laid to rest in an abandoned playground.
Junie’s single mother, Eve, receives the devastating news from her brother Cal, a local police officer in Barren Springs, a depressed rural town in the Missouri Ozarks. When the sheriff’s department fails to catch the person responsible, Eve channels her rage and sorrow into her own quest to find the killer and seek vengeance.
But Eve’s investigation leads her to the last place she wanted to visit — her mother’s trailer, filled with nightmarish memories of the childhood during which she and Cal learned to survive the harsh words and even harsher blows of their tough-as-nails mom, whose wrath makes everyone in the town of Barren Springs tremble. Eve must return to her mother’s world of poverty, violence, drugs and secrets — the world she left behind when she gave birth to Junie and vowed to start a new life for the two of them — to learn if her daughter’s death was tied to the brutal past that Eve tried to escape.
The Familiar Dark is a twisty thriller that will appeal to fans of dark mysteries, but it is also an exploration of motherhood’s many faces and the extraordinary strength of a woman protecting her child. Eve spent twelve years trying to forge a different parenting path than the one she was exposed to, but tragedy forces her to confront the traits she may have inherited from her own mom. And the shared horror of losing their daughters brings Eve and Jenny (Izzy’s well-to-do mother) back into each other’s lives for the first time since high school.
As Eve digs deeper into what happened in the weeks before her daughter’s murder, she becomes increasingly obsessed with finding the truth, and her compulsion becomes the reader’s. The case’s many complexities are slowly unraveled, including the secrets kept by everyone around Eve — her family members, former lovers, Izzy’s parents, and even the two young girls themselves. And when the truth is finally revealed, we feel Eve’s heartbreak and thirst for justice as our own.
