The Darkest Time of Night by Jeremy Finley
Sunday, October 13, 2019 at 5:43AM 
Published by St. Martin's Press on June 26, 2018
“The lights took him” is Brian’s explanation for his brother William’s disappearance. When she was a kid, Lynn Roseworth’s father warned her never to go into the woods. The same woods where William disappeared. Lynn is William’s grandmother. Lynn’s husband is a senator from Tennessee and a vice presidential candidate. It takes her some time to remember, but eventually Lynn understands what “the lights took him” means. William has been taken, just like the others. Lynn can’t talk about that without seeming crazy.
The Darkest Time of Night is reminiscent of an X-Files story. The truth is out there. But what is the truth? When Lynn was younger, she helped an astronomer research reports of alien abductions. Was William’s disappearance caused by an alien abduction? Or, as the senator fears, an abduction by suburban teen terrorists who were converted to jihadists by ISIS. (The senator is a bit paranoid.) Perhaps the FBI knows the truth, but Mulder and Scully aren’t part of the team. In this story, the FBI makes extreme efforts to conceal the truth.
All of this leads to a conspiracy (the novel wouldn’t be worthy of an X-Files comparison without one) and to a harrowing adventure involving two aging women. Lynn carries the novel, but her feisty, weed-growing, F-bombing 70-year-old friend Roxy is the most memorable character. Later in the novel, a couple of other senior citizens play important and heroic roles.
Lynn’s former relationship with the astronomer adds an element of domestic discord to the story, but the suspense arises from Lynn’s persistent efforts to find her grandson — and in so doing, to find the truth about her own childhood. The facts underlying the conspiracy are easy enough to accept — I mean space aliens, who knows what they might do, right? — but I found it harder to believe that the government managed to keep events under wraps for so long. The story invites readers to debate whether the government was right to keep the public in the dark, but the government’s ability to do so struck me as unlikely, given how easy it would be for significant numbers of people to observe the aliens doing their thing. The American government can’t keep anything secret (for which a free people should be grateful); the notion that a worldwide phenomenon could be hidden is a stretch.
But again, this is basically an X-Files story, and on that level (a level that allows for some suspension of disbelief) the novel succeeds. The key characters are likeable, they embody the kind of self-sacrificing decency that real people should emulate, and the story moves at a good pace to a satisfying conclusion. The conclusion, however, only wraps up part of the story. At the end of the novel, the truth is still out there. The story continues in the second book in the series, published this summer.
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