#TheDark #NetGalley
Best crime novel.
When a baby is snatched from its pram and cast into the river Thames, off-duty police officer Lacey Flint is there to prevent disaster. But who would want to hurt a child? DCI Mark Joesbury has been expecting this. Monitoring a complex network of dark web sites, Joesbury and his team have spotted a new terrorist threat from the extremist, women-hating, group known as 'incels' or 'involuntary celibates.' Joesbury's team are trying to infiltrate the ring of power at its core, but the dark web is built for anonymity, and the incel army is vast. Pressure builds when the team learn the snatched child was just the first in a series of violent attacks designed to terrorise women. Worse, the leaders of the movement seem to have singled out Lacey as the embodiment of everything they hate, placing her in terrible danger..
Have you not read Sharon Bolton yet then what are you waiting for? Go and read this book. Pre order this book. It's brilliant. Finished it in a single sitting.
Thanks to NetGalley and Orion Publishing Group for giving me an advance copy.

To be honest, I had thought Sharon Bolton had completed her brilliant London based Lacey Flint series since she has been focusing on her standalone psychological thrillers for a considerable number of years. Since it's been so long since I read this series, I admit my memory was not so good in remembering it, but once I started, it wasn't long before I was immersed in the riveting and terrifying storyline. Bolton picks up scary threads from our contemporary world, the online abuse directed at women and the misogyny found on social media, with the troubling growth of terrorism associated with the extremist incel movement and imagines the horror of where it might all end up. Flint is still a police constable on the River Thames Marine unit, fighting efforts to deploy her on the Met, despite concerns over her regular visits to Durham Prison to meet serial killer, Victoria Llewelyn. Along with Dana and Helen with their baby son, Inigo, Lacey is fortunately at the scene to prevent the nightmare death of a abducted baby on the Thames.

DCI Mark Joesbury has been expected such an act after the police, MI5, and CounterTerrorism's monitoring of the dark web and the gathering of intel on the MenMatter website Rage, picking up chatter within the incel community, with men being subtly radicalised through the Alt-Right pipeline. Lacey's bravery is to make her target for foiling the start of what is a deadly strategic campaign to control and push women back into the home, whilst removing their voting and other rights. Men are incited online in huge numbers to intimidate and stalk women (femoids) at night, humiliate them through catfishing, deploying violence, filming it all to maximise the level of fear and distress amongst women. Some men, cannon fodder, are being groomed to carry out deadly attacks, and whilst they may be being arrested, the police are struggling to identify the men organising the terror. There are spectacular action heroics in the novel, such as that involving a crane, as the police race against time to stop the Day of Retribution.

Lacey and Joesbury's relationship develops, although Lacey cannot see it going anywhere, hampered as she is by the past and her deeply buried secrets, secrets the incels are aware of, and which they think they can use to manipulate her. What is frightening about Bolton's storyline is that it does not feel all that far fetched in our world of fake news and the targeting of women, there is even a character here inspired by the actor Laurence Fox. This is a tense, dark, harrowing and compulsive emotional rollercoaster of a psychological thriller that had me on tenterhooks throughout, full of twists and turns, with a conclusion that suggests this just might be the last book in this moreish crime series. Highly recommended. Many thanks to the publisher for an ARC.