The point of Audra Colfax's long seduction of her thesis professor, Max Durant, is clearly announced from the start of DARK THINGS I ADORE: She's going to make him pay.
But what he owes will only be revealed through a long, slow fan dance of characters at a long-ago summer camp for artists, the Lupine Valley Arts Collective. And if you're thinking those pretty flowers when you read the word "lupine," Audra's carefully staged punitive drama should remind you that the word has another and very different meaning.
Laced with the power exertions of manipulative professors over students, of great artists over hopeless ones, and of sadists over the mentally and emotionally vulnerable, Audra in DARK THINGS I ADORE constructs a hunt-and-prey situation that calls to mind "The Most Dangerous Game" over and over. Who's the hunter here, and who will take mortal wounds—Audra, Max, or one of the others from their linked pasts? As Audra confides:
My voice is gentle and maybe mildly flirtatious. I let him have it. This gift. A bit of the wolfishness from before creeps back into the lines of this face, the glint of his teeth. I relax. There he is. The predator I'm fully prepared to face.
The tension never lets up. This is Katie Lattari's debut thriller, but she's no neophyte in the writing world. And if the motives may not perfectly match the crimes involved—without the obvious psychopathic thru-lines of, say, a Hannibal Lector—this is a tightly paced and well spun work of suspense, promising more from the author in deeper development.
The book will release September 14, from Sourcebooks. Leave the light on, and lock the doors.
PS: Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.
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