Darkrooms - by Rebecca Hannigan (Hardcover)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

Two unforgettable women investigate the disappearance of a missing girl in a small Irish town brimming with secrets--in this haunting debut from a new crime writing talent, perfect for fans of Tana French and Flynn Berry.

What secrets lurk in the Hanging Woods?

On the night of the Summer Solstice in 1999, nine-year-old Roisin O'Halloran marched into the Hanging Woods, the mysterious copse that had inspired fear in decades of children in the small Irish town of Bannakilduf. She was never seen again.

Twenty years later, two women are drawn together to discover the truth of what happened to Roisin: Roisin's older sister Deedee, a rookie cop who's barely hanging on to the appearance of keeping it all together, and Roisin's childhood best friend Caitlin, a petty criminal who was the last person to see the young girl before she disappeared, now returned to her hometown after her mother's death.

Reluctantly brought together after decades of mistrust, Caitlin and Deedee must reckon with their shadowy pasts, the monsters that still haunt them, and the role they each may have played in Roisin's disappearance.

With old wounds made fresh, the unresolved events of that summer years ago rise to the surface, and the truth threatens to reshape the small town that would prefer the past remain buried.

The siren of the Hanging Woods rings out once more. After all, nothing can stay hidden forever.

Review Quotes

"A creepy, imaginative, and moody thriller that explores the rippling effects of a young girl's disappearance in the woods near a small Irish village. A chilling mystery about damaged people and the secrets they keep." -- Peter Swanson, New York Times bestselling author of Kill Your Darlings

"Darkrooms is a powerful firecracker of a debut. It's an unflinching and brutal thriller, but a rare, bleeding and cadenced feminist story lurks just beneath. It is, in a single word, astonishing." -- Lucy Rose, author of The Lamb

"Unforgettably unsettling, Darkrooms is a pitch-black witch's brew of small-town secrets and shadows. Hannigan's beguiling debut offers the reader so much more than merely a superbly-crafted mystery; it is an elegy to childhood trauma, beckoning us deeper and deeper into her Hanging Woods with every step, every whispered lie." -- Nicolás Obregón, author of the The Sugar Man