‘Dark Corners’ by Megan Goldin

Published by Canelo,
16 November 2023.
ISBN: 978-1-80436-597-7 (PB)

Crime fiction set in the ubiquitous world of social media has been inevitable for some time as authors and publishers aim to appeal to a younger audience, and it could go two ways: either it’s as incomprehensible to many readers as that world is, or it’s a background like any other, with twisty plots and lifelike characters just like the best of the genre. Fortunately, Megan Goldin has achieved the second kind, though her depiction of social media has the ring of truth even to us technophobes.

Her protagonist Rachel Krall is a true crime podcaster, whose painstaking research into cold cases has made her successful and famous. So much so that she is asked for help by the FBI, who are gathering evidence against multiple murder suspect Terence Bailey, and also investigating the disappearance of Maddison Logan, a young influencer who visited Bailey in prison shortly before she went missing.

Bailey has asked to see Rachel, though she had no previous knowledge of his case before the FBI’s call. Her natural curiosity about Maddison leads her into the bizarre, image-conscious world inhabited by influencers, which has an unexpectedly dark side, and brings her face to face with some intriguing characters. It’s they who hold the reader’s attention: Zoe, who will do almost anything to ensure she presents the right image to her followers; Eric, Zoe’s put-upon boyfriend; Jonny, who sees through the façade but exploits it anyway, at great personal cost. The world outside social media includes FBI agent Joe Martinez, who develops more than just respect for Rachel; Terence Bailey, whose outward appearance is pretty scary; and mysterious loner Thomas McCoy, who suffers from a repellent medical condition.

The lives of all these characters and others intertwine, and Goldin makes excellent use of this to create a plot which twists this way and that until the reader is as mystified as the FBI. It’s all set against the glamorous, and totally fake, world of a social media convention, with forays into the Florida countryside and police investigation, both of which have their own secrets and dark corners. The denouement is explosive and unexpected, in the best tradition of crime fiction, despite the hyper-21^st century setting. It’s to Megan Goldin’s great credit that I remained thoroughly absorbed throughout, despite zero knowledge of the world she portrayed.
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Reviewer: Lynne Patrick

Megan Goldin worked as a foreign correspondent for the ABC and Reuters in Asia and the Middle East where she covered war zones and wrote about war, peace and international terrorism.

Lynne Patrick has been a writer ever since she could pick up a pen, and has enjoyed success with short stories, reviews and feature journalism, but never, alas, with a novel. She crossed to the dark side to become a publisher for a few years and is proud to have launched several careers which are now burgeoning. She lives in Oxfordshire in a house groaning with books, about half of them crime fiction.