The Darkest Place

by Phillip Margolin

[annieb123]

Originally posted on my blog: Nonstop Reader.

The Darkest Place is the 5th Robin Lockwood legal mystery by Phillip Margolin. Released 8th March 2022 by Macmillan on their Minotaur imprint, it's 304 pages and available in hardcover, mass market paperback, audio, and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links. I've really become enamored of ebooks with interactive formats lately.

This is a well written legal thriller series with a strong romance element and lots of action. The plotline moves along very quickly (and generally not overly realistically). It's pure escapist reading and that's not a bad thing. The dialogue is choppy in places and I found myself yanked out of my suspension of disbelief fairly often by seemingly out-of-character and completely unrealistic plot developments. The antagonists were ridiculously incompetent and so thoroughly without redeeming features, they just seemed more appropriate for a comic book setting. That being said, the denouement and resolution were satisfying.

There were some really out-of-deep-left-field plot elements here. Some of them are potentially triggering (child loss, gambling, murder (obviously), bereavement, infertility, surrogacy, and torture for example). There was also one very difficult to read exchange in the book between titular protagonist Robin, and her mother, which was breathtaking in its wrongness. It literally colored the rest of the read for me. I felt the author was portraying the interchange in a positive manner and it was horrifying. ("Tough love" is neither).

The unabridged audiobook has a run time of 6 hours and 1 minute and is narrated by Therese Plummer. She has an impressive vocal range and reads very well - however - there were directorial/artistic decisions made at some point in the process which meant that one of the character's voices was 90% screech (including snotty screaming crying outbursts). Much of the read was literally painful to listen to. I had to go back to the print format.

This might be a good choice for particular fans of legal / courtroom mysteries.

Three and a half stars.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.