I think I have read a Sandra Brown mystery before. I have certainly listened to one of her audiobooks. I had a fairly positive view of her skill as a writer. So it was with a modicum of pleasant anticipation that I picked up Hello, Darkness.
Imagine my disappointment.
This is a book of 353 pages, about 350 of which are devoted to desperate attempts to convince the reader that one of the four possible suspects is the person who has kidnapped and threatened to kill a teen girl. Unfortunately, Sandra’s attempts to feed me red herrings were not very convincing. I figured out pretty early on where this one was headed and got pretty annoyed with her for wasting my time.
The capsule summary is this: a female late-night Austin radio DJ, Paris, receives a phone call from “Valentino” who tells her that he is holding his girlfriend captive and will kill her in 72 hours because she has been unfaithful and is trying to dump him. The police – including a psychologist profiler who has a history with Paris – are notified and try to find the caller. The suspects are the radio station’s manager, the station’s janitor, a dentist with a sex addiction (who once molested Paris) and the profiler’s teen son. It is discovered that the abducted “girlfriend” is the teen daughter of a judge who refuses to believe that she has been abducted or that she was one of the loosest girls in town, a founding member of the Sex Club, a teen social media concoction that fed their need to hook up on the shores of Lake Travis.
Not only are the red herring stories completely unconvincing, every character in this book is immoral and pretty much a scumbag, including, sadly, the purported “heroes.” Thin plot, unlikable characters. Bad combination.
2 out of 10.