Not as gripping as it could have been
The story of an abused wife leaving her husband, trying to hide from him knowing
that he will be searching for her, isn’t particularly novel.
There’s a great deal of inherent suspense in this kind of story - will she ever feel safe, will she fit into a new life, can she love again.
These aspects do occur in A Dark Love but aren’t as much at the forefront as I might have thought.
Slightly unusually, we spend as much time with the mad, abusive, stalker husband as we do with
the heroine, Caroline Moross. Her husband, Porter, is a famous psychoanalyst but is also clearly seriously mentally deranged and has made Caroline’s life a misery. When she escapes with just the clothes she is wearing and her little dog, Pippin, she makes her way to the town of Storm Pass in Colorado.
There she finds employment looking after an elderly lady and catching the attention of Ken Kincaid, retired football player and outdoorsman.
But Porter is after Caroline. We follow the trail whereby Porter finds out where Caroline is, which partly includes an email correspondence with a former friend, although this aspect of the story isn’t adequately concluded. As one would expect, there’s a showdown during a storm and various other revelations.
A Dark Love isn't entirely successful, however. First,
it's hard to see what it was about Caroline that so attracts everyone’s attention and help. Secondly, the bits focused on Porter
are a bit dull.
Thirdly, several plot threads aren’t completed.
Fourthly... well, there were many other aspects I didn’t like, although I did very much like the setting in Colorado,
which was well described. But there wasn’t enough about this book to lift it
above the label ‘average.’