3.5 stars
Find You In The Dark is the first novel by Canadian author, Nathan Ripley. Martin Reese is a wealthy man with an unusual hobby. He made his money from IT, sold his company and now enjoys his free time looking after his wife, Ellen, who insists on maintaining some independence, and his almost-fifteen-year-old daughter, Kylie.

Every so often (more often, recently) Martin goes on a camping weekend, on his own. At least, that’s what he tells everyone. What he’s actually doing is tracking down the unfound bodies of the victims of serial killers. He digs them up, photographs the remains and then sends the cops a message with GPS coordinates. It’s usually a pretty snarky message, taunting them for their incompetence.

Detective Sandra Whittal finds those messages very irritating and is determined to discover the identity of the man(?) she calls The Finder, but it’s not easy: the sites are always clean; the messages from him are computer-generated. But Sandra feels he’s escalating, and she worries he will move on from finding victims to producing his own.

When Martin tracks down his final body, the one for whom he’s been searching for nearly twenty years, he finds a surprise, and it’s not a pleasant one. It seems that, despite all his care, someone else knows what he has been doing. And has implicated him in something much less benign that giving closure to bereaved families.

Ripley’s plot is clever and original, with plenty of twists and a good dose of tension, although it does require some suspension of disbelief over several aspects of the story. While Martin and his daughter show a bit of depth, many of the support characters are rather one-dimensional or a bit stereotypical for much of the book. The pace is a bit slow at times, only picking up to page-turner speed in the final quarter, and there are some minor plot holes.

If the reader can accept the premise of what the main character does and why, then Ripley’s tale is an interesting exploration of what sort of pressure it takes to make a person act on their most repressed inclinations. Ripley’s serial killers are chillingly believable, and he does manage to have the reader wavering between wanting Sandra to get her man and wanting Martin to get away with it. Not quite Dexter or Mr Ripley, but still quite an impressive debut novel.