J. Carson Black, Darkness on the Edge of Town

Darkness on the Edge of Town

J. Carson Black

Signet, Jan 2005, $6.99, 368 pp.

ISBN 0451213912

In Bisbee, Arizona, teen Jessica Parker was abducted near her home and killed. The perpetrator, dressed in a little girl's outfit, was posed in City Park's band shell. Needing help, the police chief asks the Arizona Department of Public-Safety to send an investigator. When Laura Cardinal starts investigating, she is shocked that the girl looks like her childhood friend who was also abducted and killed. Laura finds a matchbook cover with the name Crazygirl12 is on it.

Laura thinks that Jessica met her killer over the internet even though local officer Buddy Hudson believes it was a local man. Two twelve-year-old girls are raped and killed by a perpetrator using the sane MO as Jessica's murderer. A tip sends Laura to a small Florida town where she finds out the identity of the sexual killer. When Buddy's daughter is abducted, Laura rushes back to Bisbee; he thinks the same perpetrator took his child. Besides the kidnapper, a sexual sadist who tortures, rapes, and kills young girls has plans for the girl and is always one step ahead of the police, almost as if he has inside information.

DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN is a dark, brilliantly-plotted police procedural that is told mostly in the third person. The author uses the first person to hone in on the perpetrator's thoughts and feelings so that readers will feel a great antipathy towards him. This is J. Cooper Black's debut novel and it is reminiscent of the works of Boris Starling and Michael Slade who show the audience the darkest side of human monsters with the skill to make people afraid that their next door neighbor could be such a person.

Harriet Klausner