All the Colors of the Dark

Some people spend their whole lives painting a face from memory. A one-eyed boy in a small Missouri town saves a girl from the dark, then disappears into it himself and the not-knowing becomes the whole shape of a life. It is the kind of premise that sounds like a fable until you realize it is going to make you cry in a parking lot.

What it's about

The year is 1975, the place is a fictional Missouri town called Monta Clare and girls have been going missing. When one of them, Grace, is taken, a boy named Joseph (everyone calls him Patch, on account of the eye) intervenes and pays for it by vanishing. What follows spans decades: a friendship that refuses to end, a search that refuses to close and a man who keeps returning to the same face on canvas because he cannot let himself forget it. Whitaker braids a coming-of-age story, a crime mystery and a love story into one long ache and the mystery of who did it turns out to be the least of what he is after.

Why everyone's talking about it

Word of mouth did most of the work here, which is usually the honest kind of praise. Chris Whitaker already won the CWA Gold Dagger for We Begin at the End, so the crime crowd trusted him going in and this is the book that carried him to a wider room: bestseller lists, celebrity book clubs, a screen adaptation in the works. It lands hardest for readers who like their thrillers with a beating heart, the ones who do not mind a plot taking the scenic route so long as the emotional payoff is enormous. If you want a tight, clinical procedural, or if the phrase "sprawling, tender saga" makes you sigh, this is not your book. It is long, it is unafraid of coincidence and it wears its feelings on the outside. That is either the whole appeal or the dealbreaker and you probably already know which one you are.

The verdict, for now

Read it and go in with the tissues nearby and your skepticism about tidy endings on standby. This is a big-swing book that mostly connects and it is worth meeting on its own generous terms before the cameras get to it and everyone starts arguing about the casting. Painting the same face for decades sounds exhausting, but Whitaker makes it feel, somehow, like the most reasonable thing a person could do.