Wednesday, 14 January 2026

Darkness Within the Forest by Matthew Neighbours

Description from Amazon:

Shadows of recent events follow James as he leaves Alaska, traveling through Canada with a group of strangers until a detour brings them to a house nestled deep in the forests of British Columbia. Haunted by his failures, conflict and mystery threaten to pull James into the very thing he’s been trying to run from.

When the fate of other people’s lives are affected by the choices James makes, will he take a side in a conflict he doesn’t fully understand, or will he look to the road again, distancing himself from any involvement, and the potential consequences it brings.

 

This book became confusing immediately as I didn’t realise it was the second in a series, and the book seems to be in two major parts with only a slight connection at the end.

The descriptions of places were great and I did love how the author seemed passionate about the outdoors. But the story itself made me feel no connection to it or the characters. Maybe knowing more about James from the first book would have helped.

Straight away I questioned the wisdom of deciding to go on a roadtrip to a different country with a group of strangers. Where I come from, that would be like sending in your photo for Police File before you have left as you’ll know the outcome. James seems quite fine to have someone uninvited in the car with him who has been whispering secrets with one of the others and won’t tell him what it’s about. Red flag anyone? All this while he is working out what to do about a murder and a death and how he is involved in it all.

They arrive at a house that has questionable people inside and James proceeds to join the party. His life choices at this stage really surprise me. Anyway, it seems James has been recruited to help broker a peace deal between those who want to embrace forward movement and those who want to hold on to traditions. The problem comes in when a family member is aligned with both sides and there might be no winner here. James finds out that not choosing sides sometimes his its own consequences.

The grammar issues really got me in this book, though. Yes, even in edited books typos sneak through and often we can turn a blind eye to a few of them or even continuous ones if it’s the same “rule” over and over. But here we had missing commas before direct address, missing quotation marks, missing words, and numerous others.

Unfortunately, this book did not speak to me and I wouldn’t go back to see the first book to find out how they fit together. There was a glimmer of hope when James was in the wilderness, but not enough to draw me in.



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