The sleepy little town of Whistling Ridge has long been a powder keg
One spark - seventeen-year-old Abigail doesn't make it home from a party at her favourite spot in the woods - and the appearance of orderliness quickly takes over.
In a city full of secrets, hypocrisy, prejudice and anger, where the truth is not spoken aloud and danger lurks outside the door, no stone is left unturned. When seventeen-year-old Emma says goodbye to her best friend Abigail at a party in the woods, she is convinced, like most girls her age, that their real life is yet to come.
But a lot happens that night... and the next day Abi is nowhere to be found. In the facade of a small town amid the forests and mountains of the American Midwest, Abino's inexplicable disappearance causes a crack to appear, and through it, years of pent-up resentment, well-hidden transgressions, and masked prejudices gradually come to light.
Especially in Aba's family, questions arise that demand answers: what her older brother Noah was doing that night when Abi screwed him over; what sensitive Jude, the youngest of the siblings, full of scars on body and soul, knows; what their mother Dolly won't admit, and what's on Father Samuel's mind, subject to the pastor who has conquered the whole town with his sanctimonious moralizing.
And then there's Rat, a migrant whose unclassifiability unnerves some locals and fascinates others. The town of Whistling Ridge, sleepily still to the eye, resembles a powder keg just waiting for a spark.
Abi's disappearance blows up the existing reality and in the slowly settling animal dust the truth of what really happened that night at the rocks called the Bare Bones is slowly revealed...
Beyond the Darkness became a literary sensation immediately upon its release and an aspirant for one of the best thrillers of 2021.
The title of the book in the original: Tall Bones
