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Some people think that if you spend too much time listening to true crime podcasts...or playing violent video games...or reading crime novels...that it might have a dark effect on you. And in My Dark Secret by Dawn Hemmings, a young woman with a love of crime fiction decides to explore a crime of her own.
The story follows librarian Isla Wild as she confesses her deepest, darkest secret. After years of reading so many thrillers and murder mysteries, Isla becomes obsessed with the idea of planning and executing a murder. The more she thinks about it—and the more she reads about murder, both real and fictional—she becomes convinced that she could commit the perfect crime. And she details every step of the process—from the research to the planning to the murder itself to the disposal of the body and the aftermath.
From the beginning, though, as the author opens the novel with her character’s confession, something about it feels unnatural. Though the character isn’t developed much at all, it seem as though she’s supposed to be a relatively young woman in the present day. Yet the author writes in a voice that sounds more like a man in the nineteenth century, as written by Edgar Allan Poe.
As Isla relates the steps in the planning process, she does so in detail—though her descriptions are wordy and repetitive and highly melodramatic, going on for several pages about her “torment” and her fruitless search for “solace” from her agony. And the use of formal language makes it all sound more like a scientific manual than a modern day crime novel.
The majority of this short novel focuses on the character’s agonizing over her dark obsession and the planning process—choosing a victim, a method, and a number of places to dispose of the various body parts. Once the story builds up to the murder itself, though, it’s incredibly brief and anticlimactic. The victim’s death is simple, and the rest of the process is hardly discussed. And after reading through a setup that’s detailed and even somewhat drawn out, it’s surprising to find that the rest of the story merely fizzles out.
The idea behind My Dark Secret is such a darkly clever one—and it could have been a smart and entertaining read about a crime novel enthusiast executing a crime of her own. But because of its awkward voice and its anticlimactic story, it fails to live up to its promise.
Listen to the review on Shelf Discovery:
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