“When the Stars Go Dark” by Paula McLain

REVIEW BY MEREDITH MCKINNIE

“The stickiest sorts of violence are often incredibly intimate. They require trust. They take time.”

In Paula McLain’s first venture into thrillers, we meet Detective Anna Hart (whimsical name, checkered past), who specializes in cases of missing persons in San Francisco. Forced on leave, for unknown-to-us reasons, Anna returns to a place of refuge, Mendocino. After the tragic death of her mother, Anna entered the foster system, and luckily landed with a lovable couple in the small California town, the one place Anna can breathe.  When she finds out the town has two missing girls with strangely similar circumstances, Anna inserts herself into the investigation, intent on putting her skills to use despite her captain’s orders. 

McLain’s whodunit is more psychological than investigative. In exploring the traumatic pasts of the missing girls, Anna navigates her own demons, compounded losses that make professional distance impossible. Anna interacts with people from her past – town sheriff Will, whose own sister and Anna’s friend was killed in high school. The mix of past and present – personal and professional – can be a task to keep track of, but the overwhelming theme is trauma, recognizing when it happened, to what extent, and methods of healing. McLain inserts mystical elements, along with real-life missing persons’ cases, weaving a narrative that serves as commentary on the underbelly of trauma and its long term effects. McLain complicates the concept of victimhood writing, “Some victims don’t even have a whisper of no inside them because they don’t believe the life they have is theirs to save.” McClain’s dissection of narrative tropes is compelling and timely.

McLain’s gift for storytelling resonates in this genre, as even absent characters come alive. Even with Anna, McLain’s restraint with the lead character sends a message, as she’s the most present and yet the biggest question mark. As both a wounded bird and fearless detective, McLain leans into multi-layered personas, suitable to the genre. The attention to natural descriptions, at times a love letter to northern California, make for rich scenes of intrigue, as if we’re plowing through the lush landscape alongside the investigator. Anna’s present confronts her past; solving the cases of the missing girls means reckoning with her own loss. I sped through this novel, intrigued by the parallel mysteries until the very end. 

Paula McLain is the author of the acclaimed novel The Paris Wife (2011), a fictional telling of Ernest Hemingway’s first marriage to Hadley Richardson and Circling the Sun (2015), an exploration of the love interest of Denys Finch in the 1985 movie Out of Africa.

“Sorry was maybe the loneliest feeling of all, I understood, because it only brought you back to yourself.”