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    Dark Night: A Mystery
    Dark Night: A Mystery
    Dark Night: A Mystery
    Ebook338 pages5 hours

    Dark Night: A Mystery

    By Paige Shelton

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    Dark Night marks the third book in the gripping, atmospheric Alaska Wild series from Paige Shelton, in which Benedict, Alaska is met with some unexpected visitors…and then disappearances.

    Winter is falling in the remote town of Benedict, Alaska, and with the cold comes a mysterious guest. The dreaded "census man," seemingly innocuous, is an unwelcome presence to those members of this secretive community who would prefer to keep their business to themselves. Meanwhile, thriller writer Beth Rivers has received her own unexpected company: her mother. The last Beth heard, Mill Rivers had gone underground in search of Beth’s kidnapper, and Beth can't help but be a little alarmed at her appearance: If Mill was able to track down her daughter, who knows who else might be able to?

    Beth doesn't have time to ponder this for long, after a battered woman stumbles into the town bar one night, and her husband is found dead the next morning. Suspicions immediately turn to the census man, but when he, too, goes missing, everyone in Benedict—including the police chief—is suspected, and Beth and Mill must work to uncover the truth.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateDec 7, 2021
    ISBN9781250796288
    Dark Night: A Mystery
    Author

    Paige Shelton

    PAIGE SHELTON had a nomadic childhood, as her father's job as a football coach took her family to seven different towns before she was even twelve years old. After college at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, she moved to Salt Lake City. She thought she'd only stay a couple years, but instead she fell in love with the mountains and a great guy who became her husband. After many decades in Utah, she and her family moved to Arizona. She writes the Scottish Bookshop Mystery series and the Alaska Wild series. Her other series include the Farmers’ Market, Cooking School, and Dangerous Type mystery series.

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    Reviews for Dark Night

    4/5

    26 ratings6 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Beth Rivers is still hiding in small Benedict, Alaska. But when her mother Mill shows up, those threads of tension that have been going through all the books comes to life. Her tenacious mother is still looking for clues to her husband and Beth's father whereabouts, in addition to the stalker that sent Beth into hiding in the first place. How Mill manages to find her and Beth's decisions to open up to others in the community that can help her makes her remote location seem much less so. The addition of a new characters, a census taker and a sled dog owner help shore up the suspects when a local is murdered right in town.
    • 5/5
      I continue to enjoy Paige Shelton's Alaska Wild series. As good as her cozy mystery series have been, these books featuring writer Beth Rivers are edgy, and have more meat on the bone. I've watched Beth begin to heal from her injuries, and now in this third book, she's made a home for herself in Benedict. She's familiar with the area, she's an old hand at dressing appropriately, and she's made friends that she thinks she can share her story with-- friends who will understand and help keep her safe. In such a place, she is even beginning to understand that there are different degrees of quiet that she's never heard before.The village of Benedict, Alaska, plays a very important role in Dark Night and the entire series. It's a town where people have moved to be beneath the radar. Many of the townspeople have secrets they want to keep. It doesn't bother them that Benedict has terrible cell phone reception or that the local library is about the only place with a decent internet connection. As Beth begins to share her story, I'm looking forward to learning more about the interesting cast of characters Shelton has populated the town with.In Dark Night, we learn more about Beth's mother, who has made it her life's ambition to track down her missing husband-- Beth's father. Mill Rivers does things her own way. As Beth says, her mother "did fine by herself, except for when she wasn't by herself." Mill doesn't take other people's wants and needs much into consideration. Another character in Dark Night says, "...your mother has made her own bed, time and again-- and she's never really lain in it." All this makes Beth's mother a difficult character to like or even trust-- the opposite of her daughter.With a dead body, a missing census taker, and worries that her kidnapper is on his way to Benedict, Beth has a lot on her plate, and Shelton does an excellent job of ratcheting up the suspense. The author has also shown what a good support system Beth has, and once she begins to share her story with her friends, it's a system that will only get stronger-- and I feel that it's going to be a crucial factor in the books to come. When will there be a showdown between Beth and her kidnapper? Write faster, Paige!(Review copy courtesy of the publisher and Net Galley)
    • 5/5
      Winter is settling in at Benedict, Alaska, and Beth Rivers is settling in too. She is getting ready to share her secrets with some of the other residents that she has come to trust. But then the "census man" comes to the area, her mother Mill on the run from the law also arrives, and a rather nasty resident is murdered. The murder victim is Ned, who is hiding his sister who is a fugitive from crimes elsewhere in Alaska, is known for having a bad temper and for beating his wife. That makes both the wife and the sister suspects in his death. But they aren't the only suspects. Beth finds that she is sleepwalking and wonders if she might have killed Ned though she has no idea why she would do so.Beth also wonders if her sleepwalking might have something to do with her returning memories about her kidnapping and escape. She knows her mother Mill has been on the track of her kidnapper. They learn that he had known the Rivers family. In fact, that he had dealt drugs with Beth's father before her father's disappearance. Mill has been obsessively searching for her lost husband since he disappeared when Beth was seven. While Beth would like to think that Mill came to Alaska for love of her, she knows that Mill always has multiple reasons for doing things and also lies a lot. When the librarian Orin is let into Beth's secrets, he uses his connections from the secret government agency that used to employ him to find out more about her father and his partners than she or Mill had been able to uncover in all their years of searching. And some secrets are closer to home than Beth could have imagined.I enjoyed this fast-paced thriller very much. I like that Beth is opening up to her new friends and becoming more comfortable in Benedict. I like that some of the secrets about Beth's attacker and her father's disappearance are finally being exposed.
    • 5/5
      Alaska, winter, thriller, murder, murder-investigation, law-enforcement, sled-dogs, amateur-sleuth, trauma, journalist, writers, PTSD, isolation, small-town, false-information, family-dynamics, friendship, rural, suspense*****Just to catch you up a little earlier (the book gets around to it but I hope this helps):Beth, an author, is still hiding out in a remote area of Alaska from the man who kidnapped/traumatized/brain injured/stress disordered her in her hometown of St Louis. A fiction writer and journalist, she has assumed the local paper and uses its building as a writer's retreat and even uses a typewriter to work on a novel to keep off the grid while staying in a former hotel, now a sort of minimal security women's rehab and only using burner phones. She has confided in the local law and an interesting man who has more than enough secrets of his own.Now to the current story!There are many people living under secretive identities and some who wish they were. There's the married couple with abuse issues, an untrustworthy young woman on the run, and now Beth's mother comes into it (she's on the run but also following a trail). Then comes the murder. Beth thinks she's losing her mind and having sleepwalking episodes. Everyone is isolated because of a deadly winter storm so it's worse than a locked room mystery. Very well crafted and riveting with vibrant characters. Loved it even though it kept me up too late!I requested and received a free ebook copy from St. Martin's Press, Minotaur Books via NetGalley. Thank you!
    • 4/5
      This is book 3 in the Alaska Wild series and gives more backstory for Beth plus another murder! Great setting and quirky characters. Cozy mystery fans you are reading this series right?
    • 3/5
      2.5-3 stars. The book follows a young female author ‘in hiding’ in an isolated town in snowy Alaska. It’s not great as a standalone, as the story frequently alludes to events from the preceding books in the series (which I had not read). And there is a lot of worry that the kidnapper (from a prior book) might show up. I am sure that I would have felt more invested in the story, had I already known the characters from these earlier books. The unrealistic elements of the story didn’t help, nor did the lack of action to advance the plot. By around half-way through the book, I realized that we had no clues to the crime, however I felt that I had met half of the townsfolk, (which were hard to keep track of early on). Instead, there is a lot of speculation going on. Much of the real action actually happens ‘off screen’ & we hear about it from the people who were there. That said, I was somewhat interested in the story (I finished it without skimming), and I liked the book’s chilly setting, which helped set the tone. Thank you to the author and publisher for an advanced reader’s copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

    Book preview

    Dark Night - Paige Shelton

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