Book Review: Dark Places

Dark Places
by Gillian Flynn
Publication Date May 5, 2009
Source: Bought
Genres: Thriller
Goodreads

Libby Day was seven when her mother and two sisters were murdered in “The Satan Sacrifice" of Kinnakee, Kansas.” She survived—and famously testified that her fifteen-year-old brother, Ben, was the killer. Twenty-five years later, the Kill Club—a secret secret society obsessed with notorious crimes—locates Libby and pumps her for details. They hope to discover proof that may free Ben. Libby hopes to turn a profit off her tragic history: She’ll reconnect with the players from that night and report her findings to the club—for a fee. As Libby’s search takes her from shabby Missouri strip clubs to abandoned Oklahoma tourist towns, the unimaginable truth emerges, and Libby finds herself right back where she started—on the run from a killer.

I really enjoyed Dark Places, it is one of the few books that shows the heroine in a bad light and at times I was so annoyed by her lack of direction that I wanted to throw the book against that wall.  But that doesn’t mean I stopped reading it, quite the contrary, I ate it up like I hadn’t eaten in weeks.  Dark Places skips back and forth between 1985 and present day and is also broken up into different perspectives which I thought really helped to give the reader a better understanding for the crime at hand.  Also, Dark Places was a mystery that kept you guessing on the true killer.  It couldn’t be Ben right?  That would be too easy.  But then who?  “Who stole the cookies from the cookie jar…”  Just when I thought I had it all figured out Gillian Flynn would throw another clue into the mix tossing my old suspicions into the wind. Dark Places is a great thriller that I couldn’t put down, reading late into the night.