Review: The Darkest Corners

*I signed up for this tour date prior to implementing my new no-Mondays rule, so next week will be the week I drop down to 4 posts!

THE DARKEST CORNERS
Kara Thomas
Young Adult/Thriller
336 pages
Delacorte
Available April 19th
Source: eARC from publisher for review

THE STORY (from Goodreads)
The Darkest Corners is a psychological thriller about the lies little girls tell, and the deadly truths those lies become.
 
There are ghosts around every corner in Fayette, Pennsylvania. Tessa left when she was nine and has been trying ever since not to think about it after what happened there that last summer. Memories of things so dark will burn themselves into your mind if you let them.
 
Callie never left. She moved to another house, so she doesn’t have to walk those same halls, but then Callie always was the stronger one. She can handle staring into the faces of her demons—and if she parties hard enough, maybe one day they’ll disappear for good.
 
Tessa and Callie have never talked about what they saw that night. After the trial, Callie drifted and Tessa moved, and childhood friends just have a way of losing touch.
 
But ever since she left, Tessa has had questions. Things have never quite added up. And now she has to go back to Fayette—to Wyatt Stokes, sitting on death row; to Lori Cawley, Callie’s dead cousin; and to the one other person who may be hiding the truth.
 
Only the closer Tessa gets to the truth, the closer she gets to a killer—and this time, it won’t be so easy to run away.

MY THOUGHTS
Young Adult thrillers can sometimes be tricky reads (particularly for older readers like myself) due in large part to a general premise wherein teenagers assume responsibility for solving a crime without the help of the law, thereby stretching plausibility so incredibly thin that it can be hard to settle into the story. The Darkest Corners, however, succeeds where so many others have faltered, giving us a pair of young girls who seek to uncover the truth in an entirely believable way while simultaneously weaving together several crimes so there's rarely a moment we're not kept on our toes.

While Tessa and Callie do don their super-sleuth hats and set out to discover what really happened to Callie's cousin over a decade ago, their reasons for not immediately turning to the police with their suspicions are completely valid given it was their dual testimony that guaranteed the alleged killer's death penalty sentence. Recanting their testimonies would not only be admitting to perjury, but it would also give a man who arguably still belongs behind bars despite being innocent of the murders a chance at freedom.

With one small exception, Tessa and Callie don't run off half-cocked with grand ideas about how to track down and expose the true killer, instead their search is quieter and more personal, involving a great deal of research and talking to various people who at some point or another knew Tessa's wayward mother and sister (a friend of Callie's late cousin). What's slowly and fascinatingly revealed through each interaction adds a new brushstroke to the painting of what happened that night so long ago, a picture that's far more complex than two little nine year-old girls coerced into providing a false identification could have possibly imagined.

Overall, The Darkest Corners is a well-executed psychological thriller, one that keeps us questioning throughout but gives us all the answers we could have hoped for in the end.

Rating: 4/5

Find The Darkest Corners:

Amazon • B&N • Goodreads • Official Website

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KARA THOMAS

Kara is the author of THE DARKEST CORNERS, coming from Penguin Random House/Delacorte Press in Spring 2016. She also wrote the Prep School Confidential series (St. Martin’s Press) and the pilot The Revengers for the CW under the pen name Kara Taylor. She’s represented by Suzie Townsend of New Leaf Literary & Media for books and United Talent Agency and Brillstein Entertainment Partners for film. You can find her on Twitter, Instagram, or on the couch with her rescue cat, Felix.

Website • Facebook • Twitter

 

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