A review by cdjdhj
The Familiar Dark by Amy Engel

4.0

When 12-year-old BFFs Junie and Izzy are murdered in a deserted park on a snowy day in early spring, Junie's mother, Eve, vows to find the murderer herself and administer her own justice. Knowing that the small, hardscrabble ozark town where she grew up and raised her own daughter held dark secrets at every turn, Eve follows the killer's trail until it leads right back to the place where it all began for Eve and her only sibling, brother Cal. After leaving the rundown trailer where they brought themselves up as their mother cooked meth, hosted drug parties and and brought home strange men, Eve became a young single mother who worked hard and tried to avoid her mother and the life she had been raised in. Cal became a police officer and vowed to always protect his sister and her daughter. As Eve follows the murder's trail she finds that she can never truly leave the place she came from behind.

This book was a real page-turner for me. It's well-written plot made me want to read just a bit more every time I picked it up. While the ending was not completely unpredictable, it leaves the reader with a feeling of closure, however dark and troubling it might be. I will probably read another of Amy Engel's books at some point, but this book was pretty dark (as the title implies), so I need to take a break and read something lighter just now. Reader warning - there is some violence, sex and language in this book, but it is all part of the story and not gratuitous or overdone in my opinion.