No Other Darkness by Sarah Hilary

After I finished Sarah Hilary's debut novel Someone Else's Skin, I moved straight on to No Other Darkness, the second novel in the DI Marnie Rome series. It's already available for Kindle and is due out in paperback on 30 July.

Like Someone Else's Skin, No Other Darkness is a dark, creepy crime novel - a blend of police procedural and psychological thriller. It begins with the discovery of an underground bunker, hidden below the garden of an ordinary suburban home, which contains the long-dead bodies of two small boys. Their remains, now little more than bones, don't fit the profile of any children reported missing. Who are they? Who imprisoned them? And why?

The investigation into the boys' deaths leads Marnie Rome down various sinister paths, and finds that the case has oblique connections to her own past. A journalist covering the story is an old flame from Marnie's teenage years whose age suggests that their relationship may not have been entirely appropriate, and a troubled 14-year-old foster child reminds Marnie of her own foster brother Stephen, who murdered her parents at around the same age. Noah Jake, Marnie's sergeant, also has a difficult sibling in his life, in the form of his wayward younger brother Sol. Throughout the story, we find out more about the adults in all these children's lives and what damage might have been done by them - although Stephen remains very much an ongoing, unsolved mystery, and readers will, I'm sure, have many of their own theories.

There are some moments of nail-biting tension, as well as vividly-realised characters whose deepest secrets and complex pasts are gradually unravelled: this is as much a whydunnit as a whodunnit. No Other Darkness more than lives up to the promise of its predecessor; in fact I'd say it even exceeds it. Looking forward to the next one already!