In the Dark

A police officer gets killed by a car while waiting at a bus stop. It seems like the driver lost control over her car after being shot at from another car with a group of young gang members. Despite being heavily pregnant, the police officer's girlfriend, Helen Weeks, a police officer herself, starts her own investigations. Meanwhile, the gang members from the car are killed one by one...

At first I found In the Dark a bit confusing and it took me a while to get into the story. The story itself felt too constructed for my taste, though I liked the writing style of the author and the main character, Helen Weeks. The back cover promised a "shocking twist", but despite of a surprising culprit I found the end rather disappointing and weak.

Quotes from the book

Quite a few early birds were wearing pinched, Monday-morning faces when he got in. Not that most of them didn't look every bit as pissed off on any other day of the week.

Kelly was a good friend, meaning he was easy enough to bullshit.

He was the tallest of them, and most of the time his height disguised the weight he was carrying, but in the hot weather even a baggy T-shirt couldn't hide what Easy described as a "pretty fair set of titties". Easy and SnapZ liked to sneak up on him and cop a handful, and though Mikey was usually laughing as he lashed out, Easy didn't think he found it that funny.

He'd only had the baby for three hours but he felt as if he'd already run a marathon.

"[...] if you carry on treating us like morons, I will march you into those trees over there and stick your head so far up your arse you'll think nothing's happened."

"It's up to you how you turn out. There's never any excuse. It's never anyone else's fault if you mess it up."

He couldn't bear things not being right. Controlling, obsessive, it wasn't important what you called it; to Frank's mind, it came down to caring, plain and simple. Didn't matter what it was, only an amateur was content to leave a job unfinished.

He guessed that this was what it was like to lose your job, except that there hadn't been any notice, and getting laid off didn't usually involve wondering when you were going to get a bullet in your head.