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Into The Black Nowhere by Meg Gardiner is such an intense plot that
the light should be on when reading this. It is a testament
to her writing that she can have a dark action-packed plot
without the gory details and still grab readers from page
one. This novel delves into the minds of a serial killer and
those in law enforcement who pursue them. In this second book
of the series, the psychopath mirrors the real-like killers
Ted Bundy with a little of Dennis Rader.
Her descriptive scenes allow for Gardiner to “have a
touch of blood going a long way. Readers’ imaginations
are much more powerful than what I could put on a page. All
I do is suggest and then people’s fears take it from
there. It is a creepy idea that people are just here and then
they are gone. There are still victims of Ted Bundy that have
not been found. I read about recent cases around the country
where people have just vanished. Imagine, even with forensics,
surveillance, and drones it is still possible for people to
disappear.”
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The premise of the story is that people can vanish without
a trace. The book opens with a gripping scene in which the
killer is holding an infant on his lap. He lures the new mother
to him and is able to abduct her. She is not the first victim
but actually the fifth. The local police enlist the help of
Caitlin Hendrix, a former narcotics detective who had a knack
for tracking killers, and is now a rookie FBI agent assigned
to the elite Behavioral Analysis Unit. She and her colleagues,
Brianne Rainey and C. J. Emmerich are called in to find this
perpetrator. All the victims vanish on Saturday nights, one
from a movie theatre, another from her car, and others from
a salon, a college campus, and a café. What Caitlin
must do is get inside the mind of this psychopath to figure
out his selection process. The FBI is desperately searching
for him before he can kill again.
The reason for Ted Bundy, “I wanted to show how he was
someone on the outside who every mother would want for their
daughter. He was so good at camouflaging himself and was able
to slip through the cracks. Kyle is hiding in plain sight
similar to what Ted Bundy did. Both passed themselves off
to the world at large as clean-cut American guys who were
bright, had a big future ahead, charming, who knows how to
easily gain people’s trust. I wanted to show how these
monsters wear the mask of sanity because they look normal.
They take advantage of that to have people let down their
guard.”
This is a gripping novel that concentrates on the pathological
ways of a serial killer. It is informative, action-packed,
and has well-developed characters.
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