A Measure of Darkness by Jonathan Kellerman and Jesse Kellerman

A Measure of Darkness by Jonathan Kellerman and Jesse Kellerman - 335 pages



Former star basketball player Clay Edison is busy. He’s solved a decades-old crime and redeemed an innocent man, earning himself a suspension in the process. Things are getting serious with his girlfriend. Plus his brother’s fresh out of prison, bringing with him a whole new set of complications.

Then the phone rings in the dead of night.

A wild party in a gentrifying East Bay neighborhood. A heated argument that spills into the street. Gunshots. Chaos.

For Clay and his fellow coroners, it’s the start of a long night and the first of many to come. The victims keep piling up. What begins as a community tragedy soon becomes lurid fodder for social media.

Then the smoke clears and the real mystery emerges—one victim’s death doesn’t match the others. Brutalized and abandoned, stripped of ID, and left to die: She is Jane Doe, a human question mark. And it falls to Clay to give her a name and a voice.

Haunted by the cruelty of her death, he embarks upon a journey into the bizarre, entering a hidden world where innocence and perversity meet and mingle. There, his relentless pursuit of the truth opens the gateway to a dark and baffling past—and brings him right into the line of fire.

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins, 336 pages

I was on the edge of my [train] seat this whole book. Paula Hawkins has written a very engrossing and suspenseful story with The Girl on the Train. Rachel is a divorced and well-meaning, but seemingly disillusion, out-of-a-job drunk who rides the train into London every day. The highlight of the trip every day is watching what she thinks is the perfectly married couple whom she has named "Jess and Jason." This couple turns out to be not what she imagined, and between Megan, the mysterious couple, and Rachel's ex-husband and his new wife, this story will have you pulling out your hair, yelling at the characters, and mentally exhausted. What a train wreck, I mean, train ride.

The Farm by Rob Smith

The Farm by Tom Rob Smith - 352 pages

Daniel's mother who has retired to Sweden with his father, suddenly and unexpectedly shows up at his apartment in London frantic, disheveled, and with quite a long, rambling mysterious story to tell him involving a missing person and a conspiracy to get her committed to a mental hospital. Meanwhile, his father calls from Sweden to explain that his mother, Tilde, is not well, and hasn't been for some time. Daniel has not actually seen his parents in awhile, and has never visited the quaint, rural farm they retired to, mostly due to wanting to hide his lifestyle from them. As the story unfolds, the reader is unsure which parent's version of events to believe, as is Daniel. This is mostly a page turner, but I think it does slow just a bit in the middle. The fast pace picks right back up toward the end when Daniel decides to go to Sweden to figure out his Mother's rambling story himself. What he finds is not at all what you'd expect. Loved the ending!