Familiar Dark

The Familiar Dark is set in a poor, close-knit corner of the Missouri Ozarks, where Eve Taggert works as a diner waitress and tries, not always successfully, to keep her daughter Izzy clear of the hard edges she grew up with. When Izzy and her friend Junie are murdered in a local park, Eve is gutted by grief and furious at what feels like an unhurried police response — overseen in part by her own brother Cal, a local officer.

Eve's search for who killed her daughter takes her back through the town's seedier corners and into the woods, and ultimately back to the trailer of her hard, unsentimental mother, whose brand of ruthlessness Eve spent her life trying not to inherit. As Eve gets closer to the truth, the investigation forces her to confront both the town's buried secrets and the parts of herself she worked hardest to leave behind.

Amy Engel writes the Ozarks setting and its economic hardship with unsentimental precision, building a mother's grief into something closer to reckoning than mourning.