The Watcher/In the Dark

A girl gets beaten to death with a baseball bat. For thirty years, this murder case remains unsolved. When a reporter, and friend of the victim, starts to write a book about the case, she opens a can of worms that brings new movement into this case...

The Watcher, the UK version of In the Dark, was a page turner as the author is a master in keeping the reader in suspense. I was a bit disappointed by the end because its style didn't fit to the rest of the book. It was full of action and because of that it felt rushed.

Quotes from the book

My mouth could lie, but not my face.

They didn't know each other, but with a single glance, they didn't like each other.

Jonny told me last week that my face was much more interesting than Laura's, because it wasn't symmetrical and perfect as hers was. He thought that was a compliment. I told him he needed to do better.

I must have gotten the cynical genes, because I don't think people ever really change.

She was like every other five-year-old girl in the world. Except Mary was sixteen.

It was obvious that no matter how little time she had been here, someone already knew she was back. Someone already wanted her gone.

This was a neighborhood where the biggest worry was Dad losing his foundry job or brother Jim getting cut in a bar fight after midnight. No one thought about pulling the shades and curtains. There was no one around to watch.

The house smelled like McDonald's food.

"I was an asshole in school, and a lot of people will tell you I still am."

"I hate endings, goodbyes, funerals, everything like that. The end of books. The end of movies. The end of vacations. I like it when things keep going, but they never do."

"Golfers are walking lightning rods", Stride said. "We fry one or two every summer that way."

"Families don't get too upset when drug dealers kill each other, but they feel vulnerable when perverts are peering in the window at their daughters."

You just don't realize how one person depends on another, and when they're not there, it's like going off a bridge, and you're falling and falling.

He had become so hard and unbending over the years. As if standing straight made any difference at all when you were in the path of a tornado. As if lightning somehow distinguished between good and evil.

"It doesn't matter who held the bat. It was God who killed her." - "I don't believe God kills eighteen-year-old girls", Wallace said. "You're wrong. He does it all the time. Every day. Sinners get punished."

Ray wanted Stride to be there when he killed himself.

They barely pretended to search for Dada around the country, because no one really wanted to find him. If he came back, questions would be asked, and the answers were better off buried with the body.

People around here like to think that good and evil are as easy as black and white. Good people wear the cross. Bad people don't. Bad people are strangers. It's so much harder to accept that evil could be living among you. Your neighbor. Your teacher. Your friend.

[...] the scar on his face from Dada's ring was a reminder that you could fight and lose, but you could never win if you didn't fight at all.

Fate was cruel. Thirty years had passed, and she had become the person that she and Finn had hated for so long.

You can run and run, and when you think you've escaped, you realize that all along you've been running in a circle.

"The sad thing is, I'm telling you that I think you're a murderer, and you still want to sleep with me."

"[...] you have no idea how ugly and hateful people get over homosexuality. The same people who tell me that Jesus loves me would stone me to death if they could."

Even from a distance, she could see a lifetime of unhappiness in her face.

"When a white girl gets murdered, the first question the police ask is, who was the nearest black man?"

"His mother abused him. The cops think Finn snapped and bludgeoned his mother to death with a baseball bat. They let him walk because they couldn't prove it and, frankly, no one wanted to see him put away. Getting rid of that woman was a community service, they figured."

She liked cemeteries but hated funerals. She didn't mind death but hated dying. If something had to end, she simply wanted it to be over.

"We believe whatever makes us feel safe."