All the Colors of the Dark

In 1975, Patch Whitehead, a one-eyed teenager in the small town of Monta Clare, thwarts an attempted kidnapping by a local predator. While he saves the victim, Patch is taken in her place and held in a lightless cellar. His best friend, Saint Brown, initiates a decades-long search for him that eventually reveals a pattern of missing girls stretching across the United States. The narrative follows their lives into adulthood as Patch becomes obsessed with hunting the man who took him, while Saint navigates the legal and moral consequences of their shared history.

Readers who enjoy sprawling procedurals and layered small-town mysteries will find here a story about the lasting physical and psychological damage of childhood abduction. The book suits those interested in how a single violent event alters the trajectory of an entire community over several decades. A reader walks away with a detailed understanding of the survivor’s perspective on trauma and the exhaustive methods required to track a serial offender through historical cold cases.