One can only imagine the abject shock and fear (quietly and stealthily morphing into terror and bewilderment) that permeates the very soul and being of family and friends when their loved ones go missing. These are not uncommon occurrences and reactions in our society. Indeed, in Australia some 30 000 to 50 000 people go missing each year. Those between 13 and 17 make up the cohort of those most likely to go missing. Within one week, 86% of missing people are found in Australia.
In the United States (not surprising given their much larger population) and according to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons database, greater than 600 000 folk go missing each year. Some 4, 400 bodies are found each year that are unidentified in the United States.
These sobering facts and statistics reverberate icily in phenomenal British writer, Chris Witaker’s, latest superb blockbuster thriller/crime novel, All the Colours of the Dark.
Beginning in 1975 in the picture-perfect small town of Monta Clare, in the environmentally leafy and sublime state of Missouri, in the Midwest of America, the novel introduces us to down on his luck thirteen year old Joseph “Patch” Macauley, who lives with his emotionally neglectful single mother, Ivy. Patch, at the age of 13, hasn’t been dealt the best cards in life. Not only are he and Ivy living in poverty in a forlorn rental property in town, Patch has come into the world with just one eye. His one eye has caused Patch to be obsessed with Pirates (thus his nickname), “his mother peddleld the romance of a cutlass and eye patch because often for kids like him the flair of fiction dulled a reality too severe”.
Additionally, Patch is badly bullied at school, his saving grace being his one true best friend Saint, who lives with her outspoken grandmother, Norma. Saint feels emotions earnestly and would do anything for Patch. And then she does.
When Patch saves the most beautiful girl in town, golden-haired Misty Meyer, from being abducted one day in the woods, he instead becomes the perpetrators’ target. Patch then exists in a dark room, befriending a girl called Grace, who has also been put in and kept locked up in the room with Patch. Grace tries to keep Patch’s spirits up by telling him all about the world and interesting historical facts.
Saint puts together ignoble facts in her mind and finds her way to the sprawling property where Patch is held, rescuing him, with Police Chief Nix also arriving on the scene.
Photographer, Eli Aaron, (who had kidnapped Patch and many others) is nowhere to be found. Eerily, neither is Grace. Townsfolk then start to question if Grace really existed. Or if she has been conjured up in Patch’s mind to help him to survive his ‘time in Hell’.
Patch sets about painting Grace (what he thinks she would have looked like, as they existed in the darkness together) and the numerous other girls who have gone missing, but not been found.
It becomes Patch’s life’s work and deep obsession through the years to locate Grace (and in addition the other missing girls), no matter where she might be.
Saint too is mentally obsessed with the case also. But in finding Eli Aaron. To this end, she joins the local police force and even enters the FBI, forgoing the Ivy League college education she was all set for.
Will Patch ever find his Grace? Will any of the other girls who have gone missing be found?
Will Saint ever ‘get the guy’? Does she have the stomach to be an FBI agent?
Is the caring (or is he?) town medico, Dr Tooms, in any way a link to the missing girls and Patch’s abduction?
Are Patch and Misty Meyer destined to be together romantically, or are the opposing forces too great? (her family have unfathomable wealth and deem Patch not to be good enough for their daughter).
Saint has always loved Patch. Are he and her going to ‘do life together’?
Chris has expertly woven a mystery with a touch of romance and even at times nostalgia for the way life used to be in country towns in America.
Intelligence, wisdom and formidable insight into the human psyche and condition imbue each page of this stellar novel. It will have you alternating between crying, smiling and cheering for the good guys.
Bravo Chris! You have written a stellar novel that deserves to be read by all around the world. It’s themes of love, family, loyalty and hope are universal and your writing is exquisite.
I will be lining up to read whatever Chris writes next!
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