Book Review: "When the Stars Go Dark" by Paula McLain

Paula McLain's latest book, When the Stars Go Dark, is powerful, poignant, and utterly amazing.

To paraphrase that mid-90s jam, this is how you do it. What a fantastic book Paula McLain has written.

San Francisco detective Anna Hart specializes in missing persons work, and often deals with cases involving children and young adults. It’s always been hard for her to separate from the trauma and brutality she sees, but when personal tragedy strikes, she can’t figure out what to do with her grief.

With nowhere else to go, she returns to Mendocino, the village where she spent some of her childhood with her foster parents. It’s the closest thing she can call home.

When she arrives home, she learns that a teenage girl has gone missing. Her childhood friend is now the sheriff, so she agrees to help him try and figure out what happened. The case triggers memories of a similar case from when they were growing up, and between that and the trauma Anna has been bearing, it’s a lot to handle. But Anna understands the mind of the abductor and tries to figure out what has happened to the girl before it’s too late—and before she falls apart herself.

There’s so much to say but the beauty of When the Stars Go Dark—other than the mesmerizing writing—is letting all the pieces slowly click into place. Interestingly, the book takes place in 1993, so McLain intersperses this case with a real-life child abduction case, so it gives the story more emotional weight.

I’m so glad I finally got to this one. What a fantastic book—it reminded me a tiny bit of Rene Denfeld’s books but it’s a story all its own.