Dark of Night

by Colleen Coble

This mystery/thriller has it all—suspense, action, Christian values, and some clean romance. It is all tied up with themes of family, loyalty, and honesty.

Annie, Law Enforcement Ranger on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is the protagonist. She has spent twenty-four years dealing with feelings of guilt from her inability as a child to keep her little sister Sarah from being kidnapped. Annie is reigniting a relationship with Jon who, unbeknownst to either Annie or Jon, is the father of her daughter Kylie.

A woman shows up, initially in disguise, and claims to be the long lost Sarah. This woman is vindictive and confused. Meanwhile, there are other major plot threads. One involves Michelle Fraser, a formerly abused wife who has been living in a shelter for a year while she works to restore her confidence. Now she is ready to pursue her dangerous interest in mountain lions. There are three current kidnappings for apparently various reasons. Annie, Sheriff Mason, and an FBI agent along with Bree, her dog Samson, and the local search and rescue team combine efforts to find the victims.

There are too many threads to mention them all, but they are interesting and following them as they intersect with other threads keeps the reader quite involved. 

I did have two issues with Dark of Night which kept it from being a five star book for me. As the second book in the series, it is heavily dependent on characters and plot found in the first book. There is just too much background that needed to be carried over and that can cause some confusion for the reader. It is a good read but not a good standalone. Also, I usually like characters who are children, but Kylie was not very appealing to me as a character. While she had been carefully taught personal safety, obedience, and respect, I had trouble empathizing with her because she was the center of everyone’s world. She gets a huge dose of reality in this book, and I will be watching to see if it affects her in the next book which I am looking forward to reading.

I received a complimentary copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.

Rating: 4/5

Category: Mystery & Thriller, Romance

Notes: 1. #2 in the Annie Pederson Novels. I recommend it, but not as a standalone. 

    2. Be sure to followup by reading my review of #3 in the series. That book, the last in the series, changes my opinion of the whole series, which I already liked, in an even more positive direction.

Publication:  January 10, 2023—Thomas Nelson

Memorable Lines:

His love for her had never wavered in the nine years he’d been gone. It had just gone underground and erupted the moment he saw her face again.

The discovery of a body was always hard for a search dog, and Samson had an especially tender heart.

Since she’d come here and seen how a real family lived, her rage over what she’d missed had grown.