After Dark

Afton Teachout was a teenager when she was found holding a bloodied knife over a dead man. She has never been able to remember that night, and her town has never let her forget it. Twenty years on she lives with her grandmother, works the night shift at a hotel, and takes pills to sleep through the day.

An unexpected inheritance changes what is possible. Afton quietly sets about helping Sydney — her one friend, and the daughter of the man she is said to have killed — get away from a husband who is closing his fist. The plan is careful. It does not stay careful. Restricted numbers start calling. Someone stands outside her house at night.

Minka Kent builds the book on two timelines and two voices, cutting between 2003 and the present, Afton and Sydney, so that the reader assembles the truth of that night at the same pace the women do. A psychological thriller about a memory with a hole in it, and who benefits from the hole staying there.