Recent Reads: A Cold Dark Place by Gregg Olsen

Okay, this is not the first book that I’ve read by Gregg Olsen. I’ve shared before about the books that I did and did not like by him. This book falls somewhere in the middle and as usual, I’m going to really get into it.

A Cold Dark Place by Gregg Olsen

From the back of the book:

In a secluded farm house in the Pacific Northwest, a family has been slaughtered–and a teenage son has disappeared.

Single mother and cop Emily Kenyon spearheads a dark hunt for a killer. But Emily’s teenage daughter Jenna is one step ahead of her. Then another family is butchered, and another. As Emily fits the puzzle pieces together, she makes a chilling discovery: the killer is coming after her and her daughter…

Description of A Cold Dark Place

My Overall Impression of the Book

The bottom line is that while I enjoyed the mystery, the ending was unbelievable and there were some bizarre details that I found incredibly frustrating. The writing, as usual, was great and the pace kept me reading. I finished the book over the course of a few days and I don’t have much free time. So, the book was interesting enough for me to keep coming back to it during quiet moments. I finished it during the very early hour of 5 am, because I wanted to finish reading it before I went to work.

There are essentially two intertwined mysteries going on. First, a family is murdered and a tornado hits the home shortly after, spreading evidence everywhere. Emily Kenyon knows the family fairly well and her daughter knows the teenage son of the murdered family. When Emily’s daughter suddenly disappears, the case gets personal.

It isn’t that the book is bad. It just had a lot of strange and frustrating details. It was also interesting and parts of it were very well done. As I’ve come to expect from Gregg, the descriptions were beautiful and brought me right into the setting. Some of the character interactions were great and funny, and there were even a few touching moments. So, what went wrong?

I highlighted a lot of different areas of the book that I found an issue with and I’m going to dig in. I tried to make this brief, but the post seemed to keep getting longer and I was pretty fired up about it. So, prepare for rambling.

If your child is lost, you are no longer a mother.

This is a statement that we get to read about the main character, or at least my impression of the quote. I’ll type out the quote below:

“It was the one thing about which she felt confident at that moment, now that ‘wife’ and ‘mother’ seemed no longer in play.”

Page 121, A Cold Dark Place by Gregg Olsen

This bothered me because I can’t imagine any mother just decides she isn’t one when their child is missing. In fact, the way that the main character reacts to the disappearance was weird and unbelievable. On one hand, the author would say that her clothes were falling off her shoulders from not eating, but in the next paragraph state that it was less because of worry and more because her daughter was a better cook.

She often seemed unconcerned with the disappearance, acting as though there was nothing she could really do about it (despite being a detective) and even goes on a date. She often spends time roaming around between scenes, in seemingly no rush, and even hides the fact that her daughter is missing so as to avoid getting kicked off the case. Is she just a shitty mom? It was difficult to tell if this was intentional or not.

Characters Often Repeat Worn Phrases

I counted two or three instances of different characters using the phrase “Miss me?” and I have to wonder if it was an oversight from the editors or…

This is just a little thing but combined with the other annoying things, it made me roll my eyes.

Fat Shaming is a Constant Theme

As I mentioned above, the author writes that the detectives clothes no longer fit from her lack of eating. But only one week has passed and while I might wish weight loss worked that way, it just doesn’t.

The main character is described as thin and many of the other characters that are supposed to be beautiful are as well. But the descriptions around weight started to get so specific that it stuck out like either the main character is supposed to have an eating disorder or the author is really unimpressed with overweight women.

“Olga was tiny, blond, quite pretty, and best of all, carried a badge. The shopper must have realized that those attributes trumped overweight, mousey, and an upper lip in need of bleaching.”

Page 161

“Bonnie looked at herself in the mirror. She dropped her robe and stared hard. She was fifty pounds overweight, with a roadmap of stretch marks across her abdomen… She tried to imagine herself as someone prettier. Like Tina… Tina was pencil thin and strawberry blond. Whenever they went out together, men gravitated toward Tina. Bonnie had tried all diets from Weight Watchers to a liquid protein shake to the Scarsdale diet. She’d try in earnest for a couple of weeks, but in the end she’d give up…”

Page 174

Am I the only one that finds it odd that Bonnie can try a diet for weeks and lose nothing, but Emily loses enough (effortlessly) to have her clothes no longer fit her after one week? Bonnie, you might guess, is not a protagonist. Perhaps that is why the author felt justified in describing her this way, but it does not get better later on in the book…

“Bonnie took off her glasses and shifted her quilted bulk. The couch creaked. She was fatter than she’d ever been and she hated herself for it.”

Page 180

“The last words almost made Bonnie cry. She’d lived vicariously through Tina Winston for most of her adult life. But the promise of the advertised ninety-nine item salad bar won out over her good sense and bruised ego. ‘Okay. Okay, I’ll go with you.'”

Page 181

“Olga Morris-Cerrino was still all that she had been years ago. She was still blond without the help of a bottle. She was still tiny, with a trim figure unchanged by childbirth or bad eating habits.”

Page 189

“The salmon was perfect, just as Olga had promised. But Emily Kenyon only picked at is as Tina Esposito went on with her story of unrequited prison love.”

Page 227, emphasis mine.

“The display on the dessert cart at the Embers Restaurant was to die for, but Emily Kenyon stopped doing dessert when she turned thirty-five and knew her cheesecake days were out the door along with low-rise jeans and tummy-baring tops. Tina Esposito, however, ordered a Grand Marnier-infused chocolate torte. Considering all the slender woman had consumed during the meal, it did cross Emily’s mind that she was not only the ex-squeeze of a serial killer, she was likely bulimic too.”

Page 228

So just so we are clear, Tina ate some salmon, an olive from a martini, had a few drinks, and eats a chocolate torte and she’s shocked she isn’t fat? Maybe Tina skipped lunch to make room for a hearty dinner? I mean, you can add up the calories but it didn’t say she was downing a tub of KFC chicken, mashed potatoes, and mac & cheese, with two honey covered biscuits. I think she will be alright…

“Bonnie Jeffries, all 250 pounds of her, was laid out on the bed. The sheets were streaked with so much blood it made Emily gasp.”

Page 242

Not even after being murdered can low jabs at this woman’s weight be off the table…

So, every woman in this book is constantly compared to each other. Their weights, figures, lifestyles, and eating habits are constantly scrutinized. But what about the men? Do we ever hear about a fat man barely able to button his police issued pants? Do we hear about them skipping meals and having eating disorders? No. No, we don’t.

Maybe I’m being too sensitive, and these statements alone aren’t so bad. But when it seems to have to be plastered every single time a woman enters a scene, whether they are “pencil thin and sexy” or “fat and lazy,” it starts to get very frustrating. Beauty does not begin nor end at the size of your jeans.

Is it bad to describe women as fat? Of course not. It is the comparison to the thin women in the book that really drives it over the edge. And the description that Olga is thin because her body wasn’t ruined by childbirth or bad eating habits is just gross. These statements combined paint a picture that women are either born thin and beautiful or they are screwed. No one learns to develop good eating habits. The beautiful women don’t work out.

Also no cheesecake after 35? Dear Lord.

But Serial Killers Can Be Sexy

While we are hearing about the details of the weight of the women, the men are mercifully left off the table. No one seems to poke and prod at them. And there is a serial killer who is described as sexy and the statements about him are so cringy that I had to read them aloud to my husband with a groan. I’ll leave a few of them below.

“They dubbed him ‘Dylan’ or ‘Dashing Dylan,’ which finally morphed into just plain ‘Dash.’

Page 171

Wow, what a scary name for a serial killer…

“If a photo lineup was made of Tom Cruise, a young Robert Redford, or Paul Newman, Dylan Walker, and Ted Bundy and a woman was requested to pull out the most handsome and least handsome of the array, Bundy and Walker would be the ones pulled- and Bundy would be on the losing end of the deal.”

Page 171

Let’s not pretend anyone could win out over a young Robert Redford. Okay? There are more instances where the author compares the serial killer to Tom Cruise and seemingly everyone thinks he is the hottest guy of all time. So sexy that women are willing to do truly strange and unspeakable things just to have his babies.

This next quote is incredibly NSFW.

“They could see it very clearly now. Walker ejaculated into the packets, smuggled them to Tina, and she found her way into a bathroom stall and inserted the tomato-flavored semen into her vagina.”

Page 289

I did say that the man had a way with words, right? The author seems to ignore the fact that semen needs to be kept at a certain temperature in order to survive and I’m not sure how biologically sound this plot thread is. It’s also pretty shocking that these women seemingly get pregnant multiple times through this method. If we are to assume that they are all fertile, show up at exactly the right day for ovulation, and manage to shove a ketchup packet up there in order to impregnate themselves, I guess it is possible. I think it is the tomato-flavored line that really threw me on this.

Teenagers Behaving Badly

Emily Kenyon’s missing daughter behaves bizarrely throughout this book and I really got the vibe that Gregg had never met a teenager. There’s a scene in chapter 23 where Jenna goes to her dad’s house. He is more or less under the impression that Jenna was kidnapped by Nick (who is the teenage son of the family that is murdered at the beginning of the book). When Jenna shows up at her dad’s house, he is not overwhelmed with love and relief. But he’s like “hey, let’s meet your boyfriend!” and his wife, Jenna’s stepmom, awkwardly announces that she is pregnant. The whole exchange was incredibly unbelievable. But Jenna’s response is even better:

“‘You know,’ Jenna said, ‘I thought I had the worst week ever. Let’s see. A tornado rips up our town, Nick’s family is murdered, I’m sleeping in a shack, mom is pissed off at me, and now my dad’s girlfriend is knocked up.”

Page 197

Nick, the other missing boy, also has a very strange arc. It starts out good and you really begin to care about his character. But at the end, he turns into a psychotic murderer and it doesn’t make sense at all. It was very disappointing.

Other Details That Made Me Roll My Eyes

There’s a scene where Emily says she wants to push a pregnant woman. She’s the protagonist, so that was odd.

There is a scene where Jenna starts beating her boyfriend, Nick, with a stick of rebar. She hits him hard enough to knock him out and create a pool of blood. But somehow Nick doesn’t die nor does he get brain damage. If you’ve spent any time around rebar, you know this is not possible. It’s extremely heavy, the edges are sharp, and you don’t beat someone’s knee caps, knock them out and break their head open only to have them get up and charge after someone else moments later.

The main character shoots someone and then runs over to help someone else. But the suspect is still alive and still holding a gun. He, in fact, slowly bleeds to death because she chooses not to call it in. If his death was that prolonged, it makes no sense that he didn’t shoot her or anyone else.

The serial killer had a loaded gun and shot one person, but doesn’t shoot anyone else in the room. This also makes no sense.

There’s a whole plotline about babies that are born (using ketchup packet semen) and sold to the highest bidder. These families are later tracked down and murdered. But there are a lot of plot holes in and around that situation that didn’t make sense to me.

The ending is basically summed up as ‘evil people do evil things, they don’t need a reason,’ and that is a theme with Gregg Olsen’s books. This does feel like a cheap and easy way to wrap up an ending and isn’t very satisfying.

Why Do I Keep Reading Gregg Olsen?

This is not the only novel by Olsen that has bothered me. So, why do I keep coming back? Well, his books are constantly on Prime Reading and I know that even if they have a ton of annoying details that it will at least be entertaining. The mysteries are usually interesting enough that I finish the books quickly. And I love the way he writes details (sometimes there are too many details – ketchup packet semen is a good example) and settings. I think he is a talented writer and it is kind of like the book version of Law & Order: SVU (which I’ve seen every episode of…) Is it art? Not really. But it’s entertaining to watch, and in this case, to read.

I definitely prefer his non-fiction books over his fiction, so if I read another book by Olsen, it’ll be a non-fiction one.

If you want to check out this book, here is the Amazon link: A Cold Dark Place by Gregg Olsen