Great story, thrilling plot that I could not put down. Well worth a read, and would recommend to others.

I only discovered Jo Spain last year, so I’ve been playing catch up with her books, and this one I read a little out of order. It’s a dark, gripping story, set around the grounds of an old asylum. A great read.

Grimly disturbing but atmospheric murder mystery / police procedural. May have benefited from reading the earlier books in the series first.

Never title was more apt to the setting of a novel. This novel by Jo Spain featuring DCI Tom Reynolds and his team investigating a 40-year-old murder is set in a closed-down psychiatric hospital on a remote island that with its secrets and dark halls really gave me the chills and kept me glued to the pages.

The novel starts on Christmas Day and a woman is still hoping for her husband Conrad to knock on the door, after disappearing 40 years earlier, but what she receives is the call she’s been dreading. In another house, DCI Tom Reynolds is trying to enjoying Christmas with his family and trying to forget the last stressful months when he receives a call from his boss: a mass grave full of bodies has been found by St. Christina’s, an abandoned mental institution on the island of Oileán na Caillte. However, that’s not the most disturbing thing. The police is interested because among the bodies of the patients of the hospital, the body of doctor Conrad, who disappeared on Christmas Eve 40 years earlier, has been found and it’s clearly a murder. DCI Reynolds and his team travel to the hospital to try to figure out what happened to the doctor and the secrets that St. Christina’s holds.

I have been a fan of Jo Spain for a while now and I am captivated by her twisty plots, her well-developed characters, and her flawless and brilliant writing style. The Darkest Place is a particularly gripping story, with many surprises and twists and a claustrophobic atmosphere that gave me the chills. For some reason, remote islands are my favourite settings in crime stories and Oileán na Caillte is a fantastic place where to set a thriller: hard to access, bad weather, and few residents, all of them hiding something, and a mental institution full of horrifying story that really gave me goosebumps.

Gripping, compelling, and dark, this is another fantastic story by a great author who keeps churning out amazing novels.

I've read all of the previous books to this one and I have to say that so far I think this is the best. Now I may change my mind once I get round to reading book 5 but of the first 4 I feel this is the best one. I love reading these books, having gone through the previous 3 this one felt like meeting up again with old friends because the characters are now so familiar to me. This story is set on an island just off the coast of Ireland, where a psychiatric hospital was once housed. Though the hospital is long since closed the discovery of a body of a missing person, brings Tom and his team to this windswept and creepy place.  Through their investigation we find that some people still live on the island and few of them are quite what they seem. 

I loved this book, it felt a lot like the first book to me but with a more settled and gelled together team. As I've said it was like meeting old friends again and as I did that I also explored the island alongside them because the author writes in such a way that you feel as if you are part of the team, following Tom on his investigation and feeling what he does, suspicion, fear, joy, everything.  The writing is perfect and I would say has improved with each book. The character and location descriptions are spot on. I felt as if I could see and hear all of them as well as feeling the sense of foreboding that seemed to emanate from the island and it's buildings and even the howling gales and rain that clearly would be a feature of such an exposed place. 

As with any good crime story things are not as they seem on the island and this causes some headaches for the team and their families, given as this story is set at Christmas. However, this just adds to the enjoyment of the story and the impact on the festive season adds to the realism of the police work, after all, that doesn't stop for holidays. I genuinely look forward to each of these books coming out, the next one, out now is on my list and will be read when I have time to properly savour it as that is what these stories deserve. If you've not read any of them yet then definitely start at the beginning as there are changes to the characters relationships as the series progresses but please, try these out. If you like police procedurals with something a little different I doubt you'll be disappointed.

Fantastic novel by Jo Spain. I was totally hooked from page one and read this without putting it down (Almost). read this you will love it.

Just finished "The Darkest Place" by Jo Spain. Great story, DCI Tom Reynolds receives a call on Christmas Day, he and his team have been asked to investigate a missing person cold case. 40 years ago a Doctor went missing from an asylum on a remote Irish island. I really enjoyed this book, harrowing in parts but well written and easy to read.

A police procedural that ventures into a spooky disused lunatic asylum, with a clever twist at the end. Think Agatha Christie.

This is my second book by Jo Spain & certainly lived up to expectations.

A little slow at the beginning but I was soon completely engrossed.

Plenty of twists, dark tales plus the ongoing story of Tom and his colleagues made this a winner for me.

Ohhh I adore books by Jo Spain and this was a fantastic novel! Her name on a book is enough for me to buy it, and this book did not disappoint! If readers are looking for a story that you literally struggle to put down, this is the series for you! I cannot praise her books enough!

Wow, loved this book! Really enjoyed the diary entries slowly revealing bits of the asylum's history and the many twists and turns before the truth is revealed. When the big twist hit near the end, it floored me. I wasn't expecting that at all and it really made me review the diary entries in a different light. Given that the main location in the book is an asylum that undertook some disturbing treatments on patients, it's not the easiest read but it's handled well. I gather this is part of a series and while there are some minor references to previous cases, I didn't feel I'd missed anything in not having read them. I would like to seek out the others in the series though and add to my ever growing to read list. A good, albeit dark and disturbing read that made me want to keep reading to the end.

Loved loved loved it! Excellent read.. highly recommend! Have loved all of No Spain's books! This one will not disappoint !

Jo Spain’s last book, The Confession, was great but The Darkest Place is, if anything, better. The title couldn’t be more apt, because DCI Tom Reynolds’ latest investigation centres around a very dark place indeed - a now disused psychiatric hospital (or more accurately, “asylum”), St Christina’s, located on an island off the coast of Ireland. When the body of a doctor, missing for forty years, is discovered on the island, DCI Reynolds is assigned to investigate.

What is unearthed is a painful history - fictional in this case but sadly all too rooted in reality - regarding how people with mental disorders (and some who didn’t, but who just didn’t fit into society for one reason or another) were treated. The details as recounted here - both through the later accounts of people who worked at the institution and continued living on the island, and extracts from a diary kept at the time - are truly disturbing... murder was just one of many appalling things that happened there.

It would have been good perhaps to hear the voice of one or more former patients as well as staff - but I’m not sure how this could have been incorporated.

The atmosphere of the remote island and the old hospital is brilliantly conveyed and genuinely unsettling. There’s a massive shock which left me reeling at around three quarters of the way through - and a slightly more predictable one near the end.

The police characters are likeable; Tom Reynolds is that rare thing in crime fiction - a detective who appears to be a functional human being (difficulties with his boss notwithstanding), happily married and devoted to his small granddaughter. Cait. There’s enough going on with colleagues around him though to satisfy any desire for relationship drama, particularly regarding police psychologist Linda (a character I loved) and her ex Emmet.

I think this is the fourth in the DCI Reynolds series - as I’ve only read one previously, I definitely need to go and seek out the first two.

A great read, highly recommended.

The Darkest Place is Jo Spain’s 4th Inspector Tom Reynolds Mystery book and although I haven’t read the first three I was keen to read this book when I saw it offered on NetGalley as I’d enjoyed her standalone book The Confession. As I expected there are references to the cases Tom Reynolds and his team investigated in the earlier books and it’s probably best to read those first, but actually this didn’t affect my enjoyment of this book.

I was soon gripped by the mystery right from the opening lines of the book:

Forty years was too long to wait for somebody to come back from the dead.

But still, she liked to get everything ready. Just in case.

The ‘somebody’ is Conrad Howe, who was one of the senior doctors at St Christina’s asylum on Oilean na Coillte, known to locals as the island of lost souls, an island (fictional) off the south-west corner of Ireland. His wife, Miriam had never given up hope that he was alive and would return home.

The psychiatric hospital was closed down years ago, but now there are plans to build a retreat on the island, an exclusive hotel, and during the demolition work a mass grave for the patients had been uncovered. Conrad’s body was found, hidden beneath some of the body bags and it was obvious that he had been murdered.

The narrative alternates between the police investigation and extracts from the diary Miriam had found hidden in the attic, describing what was happening at the hospital and the horrific treatment some of the patients were subjected to by one of the doctors. A few of the hospital staff, including the former head of St Christina’s, Dr Lawrence Boylan and an ex-nurse, Carla Crowley, and it is soon clear that something evil is still going on at the asylum.

This really is a chilling book and in parts I found it disturbing and difficult to read. Jo Spain makes it clear in her Acknowledgements that although this is crime fiction it is based on fact – such terrible things really did happen in mental institutions, housing vulnerable people. They were patients with dementia, deformities, depression, epilepsy and homosexuals – people whose families could not deal with them and they were treated mainly as though they were suffering from a physical illness or disorder, that could be fixed. Those that couldn’t be fixed were kept locked up.

For most of the book I kept wondering what had actually happened to Conrad Howe and suspecting various people of killing him, mainly thinking it was one particular person until halfway into the book, then thinking it couldn’t be that one. I was right about that, but it was only just before the truth was revealed that I had the slightest suspicion of what had really happened, which makes it a very satisfying book indeed. I’m now on the lookout for more books by Jo Spain.

Thanks to Quercus Books and NetGalley for provided a review copy of this book.

I enjoy reading Jo Spain. In this book the 4th in the Tom Reynolds series he gets a phonecall at Christmas to say that a body has been found in a mass grave which does not belong there. The grave was on the island Oileann na Caillte which is the setting for St Christinas asylum. the setting for the book is very atmospheric, lots of things go bump in the night and the inhabitants of the island are a weird bunch with many secrets.
The story ties in nicely with an old mystery of a missing doctor, he had contacts in the judiciary which is why DCI Reynolds has been called in.
This book, like the others, has great characters and an interesting plot. I cannot wait to read the 5th instalment.
thanks to Netgalley, the publisher and Jo Spain for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Everyone knows that I am a sucker for spooky atmospheric settings, so what would better fit that description than an abandoned old asylum on a remote island? It cries out “spooky”! And even though this is the fourth book in the Tom Reynolds series, and I knew I may be missing some background, I absolutely had to read it.

I really liked DCI Tom Reynolds and I could see that I probably would have benefited from reading the earlier books in the series, as there seemed to be some very interesting history concerning his relationship with his boss, as well as some love triangles happening in the investigative team. That said, Spain provides enough detail that this was no obstacle to enjoying and following the story, but I think that I would have forged a better connection to the main characters had I started the series from the beginning. But I guess it’s not too late to do so!

As the title suggests, this is a very dark and sinister story, and not for the faint of heart – and I’m not just referring to the setting. In fact, the setting was perhaps the least frightening element of the novel, and I felt that it could have been utilised more to give the story a spooky undertone (which I had been looking for), perhaps in the vein of Simone St James’ The Broken Girls. However, seeing how the events the investigation uncovers are based on real historical facts, it made for truly chilling reading!

In The Darkest Place, Tom and his team investigate the disappearance of one of St Christina’s leading psychiatrists, whose remains have recently been discovered in a mass grave containing countless deceased patients who had been incarcerated in the asylum. Seeing that the man disappeared without a trace forty years ago, abandoning his wife and kids without warning, foul play is suspected. As the investigative team descend on the mist-shrouded island, they soon discover that some of the locals are very tight-lipped about the asylum and events surrounding it. A diary, found by the wife of the missing doctor amongst his personal effects, suggests that patients were mistreated, and subjected to cruel treatment regimens, some of which were common practice in the earlier years of the asylum. Trigger warning – some of the treatments described were truly hair-raising, and it was only due to the fact that the characters of the patients are only ever referred to through the POVs of the diary entries and witness accounts– and therefore stay somewhat remote – that the details of the “treatments” did not follow me into my worst nightmares!

Jo Spain paints a bleak and cruel picture of the treatment of the mentally ill and other undesirables in Ireland’s past. As shocking are the attempts by people to hide the truth about the atrocities committed, even in our times, when we have moved on to more humane and effective treatment methods. Incorporated into a present-day murder mystery, the events describe remain somewhat shrouded in mystery, which allows the reader to stay disconnected from the more horrible happenings. Personally, even though I can see how it all ties into the main mystery element, this disconnection took a bit of the emotional impact away for. I would have loved to get a perspective from one of the patients, in whichever form this may have taken – even from a survivor recounting their experiences.

All in all, a solid police procedural investigating a cold case anchored in one of Ireland’s dark chapters in history. Whilst it did not give me the same creepy vibes as other books with similar themes, such as the aforementioned book The Broken Girls, I found it to be an engaging read that kept me interested (and somewhat horrified) to the end.

Book 4 in the Tom Reynolds series and it just left me a little disappointed.. A mass grave is found on a remote island which housed a psychiatric institution. Tom is sent to investigate and his suspicions grow as he discovers the numbers of patients and staff who have died. The story was well written but just a bit slow at times. I liked the relationship between Tom and his team but this book lacked the character development I would have liked. A nice twist at the end. Thanks to Net Galley for my copy. Reviewed on Goodreads, Amazon and Facebook.

Jo Spain used to work as a party advisor for the Irish Parliament, and she clearly brings her awareness of Irish social issues to bear on her crime writing. In her Tom Reynolds novels much of the criminal activity in Ireland tends to have its roots in the country's social background where the Roman Catholic Church has had a major influence on morals, attitudes and behaviours. There's a sense of moral outrage in the series at the impact that this has had on ordinary people, on young people, on anyone who doesn't 'fit in'. This has resulted in abuse, in hiding away problems, the sins compounded by cover-ups that only allow other abuses and crimes to be committed. As the title indicates, The Darkest Place refers to another national scandal that is gradually being brought to light, but this time I'm not entirely convinced that Jo Spain's writing really does the subject justice.

The subject of historical scandal and abuse alluded to in The Darkest Place is similar to the one of the Magdalene Laundries, and that's the treatment of people in mental institutions. As anyone familiar with Spain's DI Tom Reynolds series knows however, the matter isn't treated as dryly as that, but is viewed in a more personal and relatable way with a crime that has to be solved. That's also integrated into or contrasted with (sometimes awkwardly) the on-going contemporary issues that face Irish Garda police officer Tom Reynolds, his family and his colleagues. Tom's relationship with his new boss has been somewhat fraught recently after the Sleeping Beauties case, so when he's called at home on Christmas Eve to look into an important case, Tom isn't sure whether it's signs of a softening of tensions or further punishment.

40 years to the day after he went missing the body of Dr Conrad Howe has been found buried in a mass grave on Oileán na Coillte, a small island just off the coast of Kerry. The mass grave is not so much of an issue or at least it's not immediately of concern to the authorities, as this would have been a common way of burying dead patients who were being treated at the hospital and asylum of St Christina's, located on a remote and sparsely populated island. Conrad Howe was a doctor at the asylum however so his body doesn't belong there, and investigation shows that he was murdered. People in high places want to know what happened at St Christina's.

Inevitably, they - and Tom Reynolds - get a lot more than they bargained for. As part of his investigation, Tom has the doctor's dairy to look through, gaining an insight into the type of people locked up there and the kind of treatment they endured. As you can imagine it's not pleasant reading, nor - if you are familiar with other recent historical scandals 'unearthed' in Ireland - will you be surprised to find out that the definition of 'mental illness' has been stretched somewhat to hide away unwanted family 'problems'. For the sake of any embarrassment they might cause, men and women showing homosexual tendencies, suspected of promiscuity, having drinking problems or suffering from depression and erratic behaviour have all been 'sent away', committed to a place where they would be experimented on, never to return to society.

The Darkest Place is disturbing reading, all the more because you know that it's based on real cases and it wasn't that long ago that such things took place. Unfortunately, while there's no denying that Jo Spain highlights such matters and doesn't stint from getting across the seriousness of the subject, some of her writing and the crime elements do feel a little awkward and out of place this time, and - dare I say it - even a bit ham-fisted for a writer who is usually much better at this. The manner of interweaving revelations from the diary are utterly contrived, the doctor raising his suspicions about rogue treatments and abuse of patients, but unconvincingly going to great lengths not to mention the name of the person in question, the person who most likely killed him. The fact that Tom Reynolds only reads a few entries at a time as the investigation is on-going may also be a great literary device for building tension through gradual revelation, but it's hardly how a detective would deal with such an important piece of evidence.

That's not the only piece of dodgy crime-fiction mechanics employed by Spain; there's also a single and ultimately pointless inclusion of the old conventional point-of-view of the killer or conspirators in italics, and evidently there's a few twists thrown in at the end. It has to be said though that Spain always manages to turn things on their head at the last minute and is always good at it. This one is no less effective. The soap-opera elements between Emmet and Linda initially appear intrusive, but again Spain makes them relevant in how they relate to families and secrets that are forced into darkness. While some of the crime fiction conventions rankle a little, there's no question however that the author does full justice to the importance and the national shame of the underlying subject, highlighting on more than one level the crimes committed, the abuse of power and the arrogant entitlement of those who think they are above the law.

There can be few tropes – either using visual imagery or words – to match the allure of an disused and desolate lunatic asylum. The more Victorian and ‘Gothick’ the building is, the more it is likely to attract both those brave but foolhardy folk known as Urban Explorers – and writers of atmospheric thrillers. Place the building on a desolate island off the south western coast of Ireland and we have a dream – or nightmare – location for a murder mystery. Then let the tale be told by one of our finest modern writers of crime fiction and, as Wilkins Micawber once said, “Result, happiness.” Happiness at least for those of us who love a good read, but there is less joy for the characters in Jo Spain’s latest novel, The Darkest Place.
Dublin copper DI Tom Reynolds is summoned from the dubious delights of his family Christmas to solve a murder. Readers of the previous three Tom Reynolds books might think there is little remarkable about that, but this time the corpse has been in the ground for rather longer than usual. Forty years, in fact. On the island of Oileán na Caillte, the pathologists have been disinterring corpses from a mass grave of the unfortunates who passed away as patients of the long-defunct psychiatric institution, St Christina’s. Those involved in the grim task discover nothing illegal, as all the residents of the burial pit were laid to rest in body bags, tagged and entered onto the hospital records. With one exception. That exception is the corpse of one of St Christina’s medical staff Dr Conrad Howe, who mysteriously disappeared forty Christmases ago. No body bag or tag for Dr Howe, but a rather surreptitious last resting place wedged between two other corpses.
For Howe’s widow Miriam the discovery comes as a shock but a release of sorts. For all the Christmases in between she has, like a latter day Mrs Hailsham, laid out the seasonal trappings in the same way each year, half hoping that her husband would return. Her children, now grown up, have humoured her in this ritual up to a point, as has a doctor colleague of her husband’s, Andrew Collins, who retains his connection to Oileán na Caillte. The fact that Collins has been hopelessly in love with Miriam all this time is not lost on Reynolds as he tries to discover who killed Howe with – as tests on his bones reveal – a length of electrical flex which left copper traces on his thoracic vertebrae.
Reynolds is no-one’s fool. As he pores through the almost indecipherable scrawl of Howe’s diary (we share that task with him, but minus the scrawl) he realises that the truth about who killed the idealistic physician involves not only the dead of Oileán na Caillte, but those who are still very much alive. One of the most telling lines in the diary says:
“It is though we are sharing this island with the devil.”
Other than that dark angel, the cast of suspects includes another former physician, now himself just days away from death, and others whose culpability in the inhuman treatment of St Christina’s patients has left psychological scars, some of which have become dangerously infected. Of course, this being, among other things, a brilliant whodunnit, Jo Spain allows Tom Reynolds – and us readers – to make one major assumption. She then takes great pleasure, the deviously scheming soul that she is, in waiting until the final few pages before turning that assumption not so much on its head as making it do a bloody great cartwheel.
Jo Spain is a brilliant writer. It really is as simple as that. She takes the humble police procedural and not only breathes new life into it, but makes it dance and jitterbug like a flapper on cocaine. Not content with that, she shifts a heavy old stone covering some of the less palatable aspects of her country’s history, and lets us gaze squeamishly at some of the nasty things that click and scuttle about beneath, disturbed by exposure to the light.

I loved Jo Spain’s The Confession and was looking forward to reading this, but it hasn’t moved me in the same way.

The Darkest Place is the fourth in the police procedural series featuring DCI Tom Reynolds. As he is celebrating Christmas he is called on by his much-despised senior officer to investigate a cold case. A doctor went missing from a psychiatric hospital on a remote island off the Irish coast 40 years ago. His wife never gave up hope but now a body has been found.

Tom and his colleagues hotfoot it to the island where they discover a sinister setting and a lot of moody silence from the few remaining island dwellers, most of whom worked at the hospital until its closure some years earlier. He is also armed with a diary which the doctor’s wife found among her husband’s possessions.

It’s a great premise, and, like The Confession, should provide a gateway to explore an important element of recent Irish history – in this case the mass incarceration of people who deviated from social norms in ways which had nothing to do with mental health. However it never really comes to life for me.

There are no flashbacks giving us the story of the asylum so everything we know comes from either the witnesses (who are reluctant to talk, for a variety of reasons) and the diary. We get glimpses of the cruelty of the regime, and of some of the people locked up unjustly (pregnant girls, homosexuals and one man apparently incarcerated just because he was in a financial dispute with a powerful landowner). However the diary is written in a fairly clinical, prosaic style which didn’t bring the characters to life. It also (conveniently) documents everything except the name of the perpetrator!

The police characters felt a little bland to me after the pleasingly abrasive cast of The Confession. Tom is a steady, nice guy, a family man who loves to be around his granddaughter, while his junior officers are hardworking but, apart from learning that two of them are in a relationship, they had no distinguishing features for me. Perhaps this makes them – that dreaded word – relatable, but they left me cold. It may be that, some way into the series, the author has glossed over characterisation, because the characters are so familiar to her she doesn’t think she needs to explain them again.

As well as the couple in a relationship, there are two colleagues of Tom’s who are estranged and with a complicated backstory. Tom is quite happy to jump in with comments on both relationships, making the whole thing feel like they are still in high school.

Personally, I would have liked more on the conflicting beliefs and values of the hospital staff. Were the practices there undertaken by people who were sincere but misguided or just cruel? What was the motivation of those who went along with them? Having worked in institutional settings, I know how groupthink takes hold. In a remote and economically deprived area, the pressure would have been even greater. Was the hospital an anomaly or part of a structure that was maintained with the support of church and state? All this is hinted at but not fully explored.

The setting on the island is atmospheric. Things go bump in the night, the islanders all have strange secrets, there is a clever twist at the end. But I didn’t feel immersed in the story or that I’d rush to read another in this series.