The Darkest Corners by Kara Thomas Review

Title: The Darkest Corners
Author:Kara Thomas
Format: Paperback

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.

Wyatt Stokes killed those girls ten years ago, labeling him The Monster. Tessa and Callie testified that they saw him in the yard the night Callie’s cousin was murdered. Or at least that is what they keep telling themselves. After Tessa’s sister and mother fled and her dad went to prison, she was off to be with her grandmother, only to return to her hometown of Fayette when her father died of cancer. Staying with her former best friend, Callie, a lot of feelings get brought back up. And when one of their old classmates is murdered, they start to admit to themselves that it might not have been Wyatt Stokes that they saw that night and the real Monster might still be out there.

This is my second Kara Thomas book. I listed to Little Monsters around this time last year. I do like Thomas’s writing style. She keeps you entertained with the story and the daily lives of her characters. She throws in what are supposed to feel like clues at the right times. I did like those things about this story. I also liked the relationship between Callie and Tessa and how it progressed through the book. I also like how the story of Casey Anthony and Nancy Grace were thrown in there, but not really.

There are several things that don’t sit right with me about this book and I am going to try to go over them without spoilers. First is sometimes if felt like she was throwing characters at us just to distract us. Like there was no purpose of them to the story whatsoever. My main thing is the third act. Now I had this same problem with the other book, too. It was great up until the third act. I am not saying that it is completely out there, but it was rather unbelievable. Like she just strung it together to “surprise” the reader, so they wouldn’t see it coming. Now I knew the person responsible had something to do with it, but it was the way it was executed and the elaborate story behind it that was very far fetched. Not that it couldn’t be done, but that nobody else noticed in all that time. And there are several loose ends that weren’t tied up before this book ended, that just seemed like they were forgotten about.