When the Stars Go Dark

The book opens with a series of descriptions of how mothers react to being told about their dead or missing children—panic, grief, the struggle to pretend everything is “normal.” The vignettes close with Detective Anna Hart revealing her own reaction to the death of her daughter and, with paramedics on-site, how she could not bring herself to let go of her child’s dead body.

Beneath an eerie yellow autumn moon, Anna Hart leaves San Francisco and heads north to Mendocino. She feels alone and has realized, “[n]o one is coming to save me. No one can save anyone, though I once believed differently” (7). That night, at a hotel in Santa Rosa, Anna pumps breast milk that she knows she should flush down the toilet, but she stores it in the room’s mini refrigerator. As she watches the evening news, a story about a train wreck that killed 47 commuters in Alabama, she considers a world full of “chaos and despair and senseless death” (10).

Struggling to sleep, Anna thinks about a case she worked, a grandmother who poisoned her grandson for no reason. Anna recalls her husband of seven years, Brendan, back in San Francisco: “We can fix this,” she says, to which he responds, “Some things aren’t fixable, Anna” (12).