A murder reunites a group of former classmates who witnessed a terrible crime 20 years earlier in A Step Past Darkness, a twisty supernatural thriller by Vera Kurian (Never Saw Me Coming).
In 2015, Jia Kwon receives a phone call from Sheriff Zachary "Blub" Springsteen in her hometown of Wesley Falls, Pa. Jia sometimes has visions, and Blub, a former classmate, had called her last winter to find a woman who had wandered off from the local nursing home. Now he's asking about another missing person, and the body she leads him to turns out to be another classmate, Maddy Wesley. Twenty years earlier, Jia, Maddy, and four other classmates witnessed a violent attack in the town's abandoned coal mine, beginning a series of events that led to one of them fleeing town and the rest breaking off contact. But now Jia believes a secret that they kept about the leader of the local mega-church led to Maddy's death, and the remaining five of them are the only ones who can discover why.
In her sophomore novel, Kurian expertly interweaves two story lines--gradually and suspensefully revealing what the protagonists, as teenagers in 1995, discovered about the church that dominated social life in their small town, alongside the disturbing revelations that occur in 2015. The heterogeneous crew thrown together for a school project and bonded by their ordeal makes for an appealing team. Thriller fans will be eager to see what Kurian delivers next. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library