“I’ve been looking for a predator. It turns out that a predator has also been looking for me.”

“Always know what you’re walking into. Dark corners can be danger points.”


I read Goldin’s book The Night Swim, which is when we are first introduced to Rachel Krall, the true crime podcaster and main character of this series.

This second book is quite a bit different than The Night Swim in terms of content. The Night Swim is a hard book to read because it’s about two rapes and a trial revolving around them. The mood in that one is darker and more emotional and could be a trigger for some.

Not so with this one.

This one still has murder and such, but it’s overall not such an emotional or controversial mood.

Goldin is becoming one of my automatic read authors because she is good at writing suspenseful plots without a lot of swearing or graphic content.

This book is formatted somewhat similarly to The Night Swim in that the chapters are broken up by snippets of her podcast. So there are Rachel POV chapters, podcast sections, and then chapters told from other characters’ PsOV.

At one point something happens to Rachel. But the podcast parts sound like she is telling them after the whole thing is over implying that you know she ends up okay. Perhaps they are a spoiler, but I think it’s pretty obvious as a reader that the main character isn’t going to die in most books, especially series.


One thing that is a big part of this book is the world of social media influencers. I’ve seen a lot of reviewers recommending this book to social media influencers as if it’s mainly written for them, but I would disagree.

I wouldn’t say Goldin writes them in the most positive light. I think it’s written more for readers with a skeptical and annoyed perspective of influencers.


The Plot

Dark Corners is a book about a prisoner— Terence Bailey— about to be released after his two-year-turned-six-year sentence. Police had speculated he was working with an accomplice in a series of unsolved disappearances/murders of young women, but could never prove it.

The FBI brings in Rachel Krall, under false pretenses, because after six years in prison Bailey gets his first visitor—Maddison Logan, a young girl, and a social media influencer— who then goes missing just days later. During her visit with Bailey he writes down Rachel Krall’s name for a reason unknown.

Rachel’s commitment to finding the truth and helping find Maddison before they find her body in the swamps of Daytona Beach keeps her in the area working with one of the FBI agents, instead of keeping herself safely away from someone who may have the motive and means to come for her too.

She goes so far as to attend the social media influencer conference happening in town that Maddison had been a part of in order to see if anyone had information that would be helpful to who she knew and where she went. (Maddison was a #vanlife travel lifestyle vlogger, etc).

[Reminded me of the Gabby Petito disappearance.]

So it’s these parts that open a curtain to behind-the-scenes of a highly curated influencer life and the cutthroat environment for those competing in the same markets.


Comments

I’m not sure if Rachel is more or less likeable in this book.

She has a romantic interest in this book and I felt myself being happy for her.

However, she does seem to have a sense of entitlement and a chip on her shoulder when it comes to working with law enforcement.

At one point in the book she was the last person to see a victim alive. They bring her in for questioning. By the time she is walking out of there she is muttering ‘Bite me.’ to one of them.

Whether or not you think police are competent at their jobs, to say that is pretty disrespectful and says a lot about how you view people in authority.

I, personally, am not a fan of journalists or ‘media’ people and think this sense of entitlement is a feature, not a bug, to the whole lot of them. Their belief that they are entitled to do whatever they want for the case of a story or ‘the truth.’ That they are somehow superior to the law or those who deal with the law and are not required to play by the rules.

At least Krall does seem to care about the truth instead of just a story.

It’s possible that my sensitivity to this thought trail is because I’m also reading Prince Harry’s book, Spare, where he talks about the paparazzi’s role in his mom’s death and the fact that they were taking pictures of her body after the crash instead of actually helping.

Anyway, Rachel Krall saying bite me to a police officer when it makes perfect sense that they would question her for being the last to see someone alive makes me like her less.



Let’s talk a minute about the social media thing since that’s such a big aspect of the book.

My husband works a normal job as a financial advisor, but, surprise, he is also a content creator:

“Chad had warned her earlier that influencers preferred to be called content creators.” (Haha)

He doesn’t make fitness videos or try to make people live their best life, he makes fun trickshot videos (@Thatll.Work) on YouTube, TikTok, etc.

He’s told me a lot about what it’s like to create content and try to get views or followers. And it’s easy to see how chasing those numbers can consume people. We’ve put healthy boundaries in place so even though he has millions of followers, he can live a normal life where we can eat our meals without taking photos of them or go on an actual vacation that isn’t a series of photo sessions.

It was both a little comical, but also a good reminder, reading about the influencers and their curated and mostly fake lives. The shine of the ‘fame’ and the pull of the ‘fortune’ are deceitful.

For those who question whether you can actually make money, it is possible.

“‘Being an influencer is the twenty-first-century American dream… It’s a lifelong vacation funded by brands paying big dollars for influencers to promote products to their social media followers.”

Even as a ‘trickshot artist,’ as we sometimes call my husband, he can be sponsored and paid by brands to use products in his videos. He has done trick shots with Body Armour, Nerf, and right now Lego, to name a few.

It can be fun and it can be lucrative, but I think the book does a good job of taking off the rose-colored glasses for people who think it’s just cake.

“What people don’t realize is that being an influencer is like feeding a monster. An insatiable monster. Nothing is ever enough. No matter how much you give, there’s always someone giving more. Eventually you have to give your soul. Even that’s not enough. People self-destruct all the time.”

There isn’t really a way to ‘win.’ Or to stop. In the book, the influencer pod’s insignia and pod name was called The Infinity Project. Which is fitting because creating content is infinite. Nothing lasts, there is always a demand for more, and bigger, and better.

You may make a lot of money in certain months here or there, or one year as a whole, but it’s a pretty fickle place to earn money when a lot of it depends on algorithms for your videos that are out of your control.

I know a lot of kids are growing up now wanting that career but what it takes to become successful is probably not worth it. The ‘success’ they think they’ll find is most likely elusive.

And like the book shows, it really affects your relationship with your family and friends. It becomes harder and harder to prioritize them above your content.


So maybe this book could be a little bit of a wake-up call to social media influencers to step back from their life and see what messages they’re sending and what person it’s turned them into.

But it also acts as a reminder to the rest of us that we’re not missing out on anything by living normal lives. Stay the course!



As for the ‘mystery’ of it, I wouldn’t say that the twist was out of left-field. I had it mostly figured out pretty early on, but there were some extra pieces that I wasn’t sure how they fit so I liked that.

And of course, even though I thought I knew what was going on, I still had to finish reading to see if I was right!


Daytona Beach is a new setting for me. Can’t say this book made me want to visit there, especially the whole rat-infested trailer with snakes climbing through the windows part. Hard pass on that one.


Trimethylaminuria is the very rare condition one of the characters has where you smell like rotten eggs or fish and it’s incurable. I think I’m personally in the clear, but it’s now added to my list of fears for my kids or grandkids because wow that is not something you want to be diagnosed with and apparently it can present at the time of puberty. There’s not a whole lot you can do for it and the implications of that for someone’s life is really sad!


Ouroboros is the symbol of a snake eating its tail which is referenced in the book a lot. It said that snakes really do that in real life so I obviously looked up a video of it and it was low key disturbing.


I learned a fun bee fact:

“A bee flaps its wings more than 200 times a minute to stay airborne… also bees remember faces. Every human face is like a different flower to a honeybee.”

Which led me to look up the fact to confirm it because it was really interesting, and then I found out ANOTHER fun bee fact: Criminologists use bees to study serial killers because bees’ feeding patterns are similar to serial killers’ killing patterns as far as geographical profiling goes.

So that’s crazy.

I also learned a new phrase in this book: “Cottoning on.” It means to begin to understand.

As in: I’m cottoning on to bees.



I would definitely recommend this book. It’s a suspenseful, clean read with a good and unique plot.


[Content Advisory: 0 f-words, 7 s-words; no sexual content]

**Received an ARC via NetGalley**