At less than 300 pages, Somewhere in the Dark won’t take up a full afternoon to read, but I promise you, you will be thinking about it for the rest of the night. Somewhere in the Dark is my second R.J. Jacobs read in a week, but I admit that it is the one I like the best. An unreliable narrator with a strange, creepy history. A famous duo whose facade is starting to crumble under public scrutiny. A criminal history that cannot be erased, and one that will find our main character stumbling through the dark, desperately searching for answers before she gets locked up again.

I love unreliable narrators as they give something to a novel that is hard to effectively emulate. Of course, there is a spectrum of unreliable narrators, and I won’t be the first to admit that some of these kinds of narrators are full of themselves, skew the story in a direction that doesn’t pay off, or make the reading process hell. My favourite kind of unreliable narrator is the one that tries to help, and tries to do what is right, but is veering too close to the moral dilemma of what is right or wrong, what is breaching privacy or one’s comfort, and what state they are in, or if they can even help themselves anymore. Jessie is one of these characters, and as I’ve alluded to, she has a past. Not only is there a criminal history with her – one at the centre of this mess – but she has a childhood you wouldn’t wish upon your worst enemy. This makes her entirely unreliable, even though you so desperately want to trust her.

The events of this book will make you turn the page faster and faster, needing to find answers and being unable to slow down. You will start jumping ahead as you read just to learn more, eager for the puzzle pieces to align. I was one such reader, and I did not want to take breaks for dinner – I needed to help Jessie! I needed to know who was behind it, what that new detail point led to, and why things were spiralling so magnificently. There are some incredible characters in here and I love the fact that there is a kind of care given to Jessie despite current events. After all, her childhood was rough, to say the least, and she is still a human being despite how she was treated.

The details and descriptions are superb, so rich and vivid, which makes reading Somewhere in the Dark a wonderfully immersive and fun time. character decisions followed logical paths, some of which collided but that makes them all the more believable given the characters in question. The crime is intriguing, the chase for the culprit more so, and the lead-up makes you unable to turn away once all the blocks start tumbling down.

I highly recommend Somewhere in the Dark to all thriller, suspense, and crime fiction readers. It is an action-packed, high-tension, exhilarating read and I cannot believe it only has less than 1000 ratings on Goodreads. I know not to trust Goodreads with much, but general interest in a book is easy to find there and I was shocked to find Somewhere in the Dark has so few reads. Please read it! I promise it will be worth your time.