Review: WE ARE ALL THE SAME IN THE DARK

WE ARE ALL THE SAME IN THE DARK by Julia Heaberlin (Penguin, 2020)

Reviewed by Craig Sisterson

It's been a decade since Trumanell Branson disappeared, leaving only a bloody handprint behind. Her pretty face still hangs like a watchful queen on the posters on the walls of the town's Baptist church, the police station, and in the high school. They all promise the same thing: We will find you. Meanwhile, her brother, Wyatt, lives as a pariah in the desolation of the old family house, cleared of wrongdoing by the police but tried and sentenced in the court of public opinion and in a new documentary about the crime.

When Wyatt finds a lost girl dumped in a field of dandelions, making silent wishes, he believes she is a sign. The town's youngest cop, Odette Tucker, believes she is a catalyst that will ignite a seething town still waiting for its own missing girl to come home. But Odette can't look away. She shares a wound that won't close with the mute, one-eyed mystery girl. And she is haunted by her own history with the missing Tru.

Desperate to solve both cases, Odette fights to save the lost girl in the present and to dig up the shocking truth about a fateful night in the past--the night her friend disappeared, the night that inspired her to become a cop, the night that wrote them all a role in the town's dark, violent mythology.

A young cop with a prosthetic leg. A teenage runway with a glass eye. A troubled pariah who talks to his long-vanished sister like she’s still in the room. Texas author Julia has once again crafted an absorbing rural thriller centred on damaged, complex characters.

WE ARE ALL THE SAME IN THE DARK is a clever tale full of emotional depth. Ten years ago Odette Tucker lost part of her leg in an horrific crash. On the same night cheerleader Trumanell Branson and her violent father vanished from their Texas town. Wyatt Branson, Trumanell’s brother and the boy Odette had been seeing, fell under a cloud of suspicion and spent years in a mental hospital despite being cleared. By the police, not the public. Now a TV documentary has vilified him again, so when Odette hears he’s been seen with a young woman she rushes to his house. Did Wyatt really rescue one-eyed ‘Angel’ from a field of dandelions? Or has he been a predator all this time?

Heaberlin weaves an absorbing slow-burn thriller that delivers in spades on its small town full of secrets setting, while elevating that familiar backdrop with her rich characterisation and the way she casts light on real-life issues that don’t always get a lot of prominent coverage (eg amputees).

There are some real jolts – including a huge swerve that would be the #hashtag-creating focus of other books (#CantBelieveTheTwist, etc), but here that is only one part of the overall tale, and to my mind is made even more impactful by the deep characters Heaberlin has crafted.

I've become a big fan of Heaberlin's storytelling over the past decade. Her thrillers are full of rich characterisations, centring on unusual protagonists including a former rodeo rider who discovers she may have been kidnapped as a baby (PLAYING DEAD), the sole survivor of a serial killer beginning to question if an innocent man is about to be executed (BLACK-EYED SUSANS), and a young woman who tricks an ailing old man she believes might be a murderer into taking a road trip into the desert (PAPER GHOSTS).

While Julia Heaberlin writes standalones rather than series novels, there is a constancy among her bibliography, threads running through the disparate tales: each is a clever standalone thriller full of different plotlines and characters, but each time we're offered rich characters and a terrific sense of the Texan setting. It's a resume full of atmospheric and emotional depth.

Recommended.

Craig Sisterson is a lawyer turned features writer from New Zealand, now living in London. In recent years he’s interviewed hundreds of crime writers and talked about the genre on national radio, top podcasts, and onstage at books festivals on three continents. He has been a judge of the Ned Kelly Awards and the McIlvanney Prize, and is founder of the Ngaio Marsh Awards and co-founder of Rotorua Noir. You can heckle him on Twitter.