It’s Christmas Eve and Vera Coffey is on the run. What she brings to the little town of American Rapids is certainly not holiday cheer. She has something with her, and the people following her will do anything to get it back.

In Pitch Dark, Steven Sidor sets an extremely creepy stage. A small town in the middle of nowhere, a blizzard, and the eve of a holiday, when no one expects bad things to happen. These are nice people — Vera, Adam, Wyatt, Opal and Max — and they have no idea what’s coming for them. Vera had a fight with her boyfriend and ran. She meets Adam on the road, heading home to see his parents for Christmas. Wyatt and Opal’s life together has already been scarred by violence; they thought running the Rendezvous Motel would give them the peace and quiet they wanted.

Pitch Dark is a quick read — mainly because you want to get through it and see what happens. The tension builds as bits and pieces of the story are revealed. There are old stories, truth and fiction, and there are connections you don’t immediately see. There is organization and method behind this, a terrible, dark intelligence. It sounds crazy at first, like the visions Opal has been having, but sometimes even crazy stories have a bit of truth in them.

This is a great little thriller – a perfect read for Halloween week. (It’s certainly not a Christmas story, no matter when it’s set!) It was easy to get caught up in the story, to start to worry about the characters and whether they’ll be okay, and to wonder about the mystery and the madman at the heart of the story.

Steven Sidor is the author of three dark thrillers Skin River, Bone Factory, and The Mirror’s Edge. Check out StevenSidor.com for more info on his earlier books and for a special prequel, A Chunk of Hell, available for free on his website.

My copy of Pitch Dark was provided by LibraryThing Early Reviewers.