Domestic

Part police procedural, part domestic suspense, All the Dark Places provides mystery fans with the reading experience they crave. It’s psychologist Jay Bradley’s 40th birthday, and Molly, his wife, has planned a small get together in their suburban Boston home. By midnight, the other couples have left, Molly has teeter-totted off to bed, and Jay has checked into his stand-alone office in the backyard to work on his book. But when Molly wakes up, Jay isn’t in bed, the scent of coffee isn’t permeating the house, and the door to Jay’s office is wide open—with him dead on the floor, his neck horribly slashed. Enter Boston PD Detective Rita Myers, who leads the investigation and is convinced that Jay has been murdered by someone in their close circle. But why would one of their friends—affluent, happy, and seemingly complacent—murder everybody-loves-Jay? Parlato skillfully moves the story between Rita and the present day inquiry and Molly and what we discover is her horrible past. She also imbues the book with plenty of humanity—60-ish Rita has a bit of a love interest, Molly adopts a lovely dog to help keep her safe—and never once does the brisk narrative veer into the unbelievable. For fans of Shari Lapena and Mary Kubica.

Dr. Laina Landers is the sort of shrink anyone would want. She’s super smart, wonderfully compassionate, and completely devoted to her patients. So when the husband of a couple she is working with holds his wife hostage at gunpoint—an incident broadcast on live TV—Laina quickly gets to the scene. She saves them both, while also meeting investigative journalist Cal Murray. Empathetic? Check. Handsome? Oh, yes. Reliable? Totally. Which comes in handy, as Laina really needs a friend/lover she can depend on as her patients are receiving deeply unsettling “presents,” like a plastic fetus in a bottle of fluid, each with the same message: Watching you. More disturbing, the gift giver is relying on knowledge about the patients that can only be found in Laina’s notes from her sessions. But who would want to destroy Laina and kill her practice in the process? As Laina and Cal search for the possible culprit, the stakes get higher as the therapist herself is targeted. The I-didn’t-see-that-coming conclusion is guaranteed to make your head explode.

On the surface, Oak Hill, New Jersey, is, yes, a perfect neighborhood. Perfect lawns, perfect homes, perfect families. A crack appears when we see local high-schooler Cassidy on a clandestine outing, running late to meet Billy, the kindergartener she babysits for when he walks home from school. He doesn’t show, and his disappearance reveals the hurt, deception, and toxic boredom lurking behind many of the tony town’s facades. Billy’s mother, Rachel, is overprotective; his father resents his younger wife for trapping him in this second marriage by becoming pregnant; his older stepbrother, a small-time drug dealer, barely acknowledges Billy. Cassidy, reviled in the papers as The Babysitter, is having an affair with a much older man. The local celebrities, has-been musician Chris and his actress wife, Allison, have just split up and she’s moved away with no explanation. As the investigation into Billy’s disappearance continues, his shattered family is the nexus of a town in turmoil, allowing Alterman to show how pressure and desperation can manifest in very different ways and result in vastly different outcomes. Billy’s disappearance isn’t the only crime, and the interpersonal stories as well as the crime-centered mysteries will keep readers shaking their heads in disbelief as they keep the pages turning, hoping for justice.