Eden Wallace, 34, widow. Name, rank, serial number, right? Once a military wife, always a military wife.

If you wanted to spend the day with me…it would have to be a day in the life.

The thing is, I’m afraid of the dark.

I haven’t always been this way. I used to be a grown up. Or, I thought was, once. It’s hard to remember. In the time since Bix, my husband, died, I’ve lost track of the woman I might have once been. She seems like a person I met or read about, instead of some earlier incarnation of myself. She might have been a grown up, or she might have been someone who tagged along after her career-Army husband from state to state for the last ten years, from one desolate life milestone to another. Forgoing all the things I actually wanted to be, by the way. I’ve been too busy to piece her back together. Too busy mourning, and not just the man but the life I thought I’d been living.

Bix left behind a mess when he died, but at least he had a few things figured out. He left me set up financially—for a while. That’s about to run out. I’ll have to sell the house and—I don’t know. I’ll have to move on. I just haven’t decided how to do that.

Here’s what I’m going to try: In Bix’s things, I found paperwork about a reservation at a dark sky park in Michigan, way up north on the very tip-top of the mitten. (Michigan people are very into the mitten shape of their state. It’s a little weird.) A dark sky park? I didn’t know what it was either. It’s this place set aside with artificial light strictly controlled, so that you can see the night sky the way nature intended: the constellations, the shooting stars, the Milky Way pouring out over the sky. It sounds beautiful, romantic. And it would have been, if he hadn’t died.

I’m going—on my own. Who would I take? My sister is busy with her kids. Everybody else is tired of my grief. But then, I’m tired of my grief, too, which is why I’m forcing myself to take this trip.

It won’t be all bad. That area near the park is the lower peninsula near Mackinac Island and the big suspension bridge they call the Mighty Mac. It’s supposed to be beautiful, and I’m a photographer. My specialty is usually bits and pieces: the corner of something, the edge, a close-up view so zoomed in as to make the object foreign. I like surfaces and textures: the bright shine of the sun on a tabletop or a reflection in a window, glint and glare filling the viewfinder, everything obscured, everything lost to the light. The guest house Bix rented in the park will be a getaway, a retreat. I’ll take the camera out to the lake during the day to find a ripple on the surface, to find the thinnest tip of a blade of sea grass. And at night—well, at night, I’ll probably climb the walls with night terrors. I’ll have to catch a few winks of sleep at some point, but why start now? I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in nine months.

I keep thinking. . .what if I can break my fear wide open, if only I face it? Meet the enemy, head on, take back my life. That’s what Bix would have told me to do. That jerk.

Like I want to do anything he’d want me to do, now. But then what choice do I have? Either I break out of this fear or this is all I’ll ever be: angry, widowed, scared. Lonely.

Giveaway: Leave a comment below for your chance to win a print copy of Under A Dark Sky. U.S. entries only, please. The giveaway ends August 13, 2018. Good luck everyone!

You can read more about Eden in Under A Dark Sky, an intriguing twist on a locked-room mystery.

Only in the dark can she find the truth . . .

Since her husband died, Eden Wallace’s life has diminished down to a tiny pinprick, like a far-off star in the night sky. She doesn’t work, has given up on her love of photography, and is so plagued by night terrors that she can’t sleep without the lights on. Everyone, including her family, has grown weary of her grief. So when she finds paperwork in her husband’s effects indicating that he reserved a week at a dark sky park, she goes. She’s ready to shed her fear and return to the living, even if it means facing her paralyzing phobia of the dark.

But when she arrives at the park, the guest suite she thought was a private retreat is teeming with a group of twenty-somethings, all stuck in the orbit of their old college friendships. Horrified that her get-away has been taken over, Eden decides to head home the next day. But then a scream wakes the house in the middle of the night. One of the friends has been murdered. Now everyone—including Eden—is a suspect.

Everyone is keeping secrets, but only one is a murderer. As mishaps continue to befall the group, Eden must make sense of the chaos and lies to evade a ruthless killer—and she’ll have to do it before dark falls. . .

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About the author
Lori Rader-Day is a three-time Mary Higgins Clark Award nominee, winning the award in 2016 for her second novel, Little Pretty Things. She is the author of Under a Dark Sky, and of The Black Hour, winner of the Anthony Award for Best First Novel, The Day I Died, a finalist for the Mary Higgins Clark Award, Thriller Award, Anthony Award, and Barry Award. She lives in Chicago, where she is active in Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime and co-chairs the mystery conference Murder and Mayhem in Chicago.

All comments are welcomed.