Book Review: We Are All the Same in the Dark

We Are All the Same in the Dark by Julia Heaberlin


On the surface, this book is a standard police procedural, but a few unusual twists and good writing make it memorable. It takes place in a small Texas town, depicted exactingly in its hot, backwards, narrow minded glory. Odette is a young cop, the daughter of the previous police chief. As her father’s daughter, she holds a little more sway than many in the town, though she still has to fight against conservative expectations.

Odette is obsessed (as are many in the town) with the death and/or disappearance of a young woman named Trumanelle and her ne’er-do-well father. The entire town is obsessed with Trumanelle’s death and/or disappearance, but Odette was involved because she was friends with Trumanelle and lost her leg in an accident the night it happened. Complicating things, Trumanelle is the sister of Wyatt, who is the one most people in town thing was guilty of the crime. Also, Wyatt was Odette’s old boyfriend. Also, she had an affair with him. Also, Wyatt isn’t all right in the head and he speaks to Trumanelle all the time as if she’s alive and in the house with him. The town all things he killed his sister and father and only Odette’s intervention keeps Wyatt out of jail on more than one occasion.

Wyatt finds a young girl on the side of the road in a circle of dandelions and takes her back to town. The girl doesn’t speak, so they call her Angel. Odette takes a break from her job and her relentless pursuit of the truth behind Trumanelle’s disappearance to find Angel a safe place to stay and find out Angel’s backstory. She’s convinced that Angel has something to do with Trumanelle’s case. I found this hard to believe. You know sometimes characters in novels are convinced that A has something to do with B and the reader goes along with it because that’s what plot is? Well, it went on for a while so I eventually got kinda frustrated, like I wanted to tell Odette “this girl has nothing to do with the case. Why are you so obsessive?”

The story takes two unexpected turns. One happened about 2/3rds of the way through when the story revolves less around Odette and more around Angel. I found Angel an interesting character as well, once we learned about her. The second unexpected turn was who the real killer turned out to be. It was a bit of a letdown. Like, I hadn’t expected them because the motive was so flimsy and there hadn’t been any inkling of it earlier in the book. I guess it made sense in that the book as a larger piece of work had the themes of people being held to different standards based on their social ranking in such a conservative town, but it still left a bad taste in my mouth. Like I felt that the author had not only created a horrible person but also a backwards town that would ensure that the remorseless killer would experience almost no punishment on account of how the town perceived this nasty slug.






View all my reviews