Whitesands by Johann Thorsson

 

Whitesands by Johann Thorsson.

Published 26th September 2021 by Headshot Books.

From the cover of the book:

Detective John Dark’s daughter has been missing for two years. In his frantic and unfruitful search for her two years ago, Dark overreached, and was reprimanded and demoted.

Now suddenly back into the homicide department, Dark is put on a chilling case – a man who killed his wife in their locked house and then dressed the body up to resemble a deer, but claims to remember none of it. A few days later an impossibly similar case crops up connecting the suspects to a prep school and a thirty year old missing persons’ case.

Just as Dark is getting back into his old groove, a new lead in his daughter’s disappearance pops up and threatens to derail his career again.

Time is running out and John Dark needs to solve the case before more people are killed, and while there is still hope to find his daughter.

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John Dark is a good detective, with uncanny instincts. Unfortunately, his mind has not really been on the job since the disappearance of his teenage daughter two years ago. Consumed by his search for her, Dark has spread himself too thin and burned a lot of bridges, and the resulting hot water has earned him reprimands and demotion - his marriage and relationship with his son have also suffered from his emotional, and often physical, absence. But Dark is still determined to find his daughter, and he just might be onto the best lead he has had in months, if only he can keep everything together.

As Dark is following up his new lead, he and his long-suffering partner Monique are called to a domestic disturbance, which turns out to be the scene of a gruesome murder. Suddenly, they find themselves back in the Homicide Department, and Dark is given an unexpected chance to save his career. This seems an open and shut case, with no one home but a horribly butchered wife and a husband with blood literally on his hands, but there are some very odd things about the way the body has been arranged - and when the husband claims to know nothing about how his wife came to be killed Dark finds himself believing him.

Days later, another woman is brutally killed by her husband in similar circumstances, and Dark cannot shift the feeling that the murders are connected in some way, however bizarre this seems. The plot thickens when Dark and Monique discover that both men, and three of their friends, were involved in the case of a missing girl during their school days at the exclusive Whitesands - a girl who was presumed to have run away, but was never traced. Are these five school friends guilty of a crime, and have the sins of the past started to catch up with them?

Whitesands is a creepy cross-over between police procedural and supernatural horror story, and marks the beginning of a brand new series of books about John Dark. As we follow the course of the investigation into some very unusual deaths, both Dark and his partner are torn between difficulties in their personal and professional lives. Dark struggles to separate his need to find his missing daughter from all other aspects of his life, and the story swings back and forth between the shocking cases, and what he uncovers from his new lead into her whereabouts - with the addition of a third thread about a character called Daniel who sheds some intriguing light on the murders. We also get a glimpse into Monique's difficult relationship with her own drug-addicted daughter, something which allows her to feel a connection with Dark and his own family problems.

The fun part of the story lies in the cases themselves, which are gory, down-right weird, and with an unmistakeable dark noir feel that clearly stems from Thorsson's Icelandic roots. These are not straightforward murders, and Thorsson builds up a pretty disturbing picture of the events that draw Dark and Monique into some very eerie country, before blowing everything wide open with a deliciously haunting, supernatural plotline around crimes that have gone unpunished and what happens to the dead who have business left unfinished.

Wrapped up in a cracking page-turner of a tale, the personal and professional threads of the story delve into some very interesting themes around money, privilege, discrimination, and family, which make this thriller a cut above the crowd. This is one I sat down and read almost entirely in one sitting - the need for sleep the only thing keeping me from consuming the whole delectable book in one go - and I am really looking forward to whatever Thorsson has planned for Dark in his next adventure.

Whitesands is available to buy now in paperback and ebook from our favourite book retailer.

Thank you to Bloodshot Books for sending me an ecopy of this book in return for an honest review, and to Tracy Fenton of Compulsive Readers Tours for inviting me to  be part of this blog tour.

About the author:

Johann Thorsson is a native of cold, dark Iceland and he writes cold, dark fiction.

His favourite books include The Silence of the Lambs, Annihilation and We Have Always Lived in the Castle.