Plot Summary
Prologue
In Chicago, 1979, a man lowers himself from a stool with a nylon noose around his neck. A pulley system snakes overhead in an M shape; the other end of the rope hoists his bound victim six feet away. The noose tightens, his vision spots, and an unbearable euphoria washes over him — The Rush, he calls it, a sensation more potent than any drug.
He hangs there at the border of consciousness, watching the woman levitate, before his survival instinct kicks in and he finds the stool again. Afterward, he cleans up, hides the bruises on his neck, and slips into bed beside his stirring wife,2 where the residual flood of endorphins overtakes him.
The prologue immerses us in a killer's ecstatic ritual, positioning mortal violence as an addictive high. The apparatus—a shared noose system—literalizes the parasitic dynamic: his pleasure depends entirely on her death. By juxtaposing the grisly workspace with the domestic bedroom, the passage exposes the double life of a predator whose wife unknowingly becomes a post-murder receptacle for his arousal. This opening establishes the novel's central psychopathology: the pursuit of The Rush as a self-annihilating hunger that blurs the line between suicide and homicide, foreshadowing the book's eventual confrontation with inherited darkness.
A Shattered Doll, A Frozen Girl
Forensic reconstructionist Rory Moore,1 who prefers the company of antique china dolls to people, meets Walter Byrd in a library. He presents his dead daughter Camille9's fractured Kestner doll and a plea: restore the doll, yes, but also reconstruct the crime that left Camille strangled and frozen in Grant Park.
Rory's boss, Detective Ron Davidson,8 engineered the meeting to end her self-imposed hiatus. Before she leaves the library, her phone rings: her father, Frank Moore,4 has suffered a fatal heart attack. The death will unravel the carefully ordered compartments of her life.
The dual request—mend a doll, solve a murder—mirrors Rory's own fractured psyche. Camille's shattered porcelain becomes a metaphor for the reconstruction of trauma, both external and internal. Frank's death at this precise moment is not coincidence but narrative gravity: the collapse of the father figure that will force Rory to confront the secrets he spent a lifetime burying. The library setting, a cathedral of archived stories, underscores the novel's theme of retrieving lost narratives from the silence of the past.
The Client She Never Knew
While closing Frank's law practice, Rory1 is summoned by Judge Russell Boyle. He explains that Frank4's longtime client, Thomas Mitchell,3 is about to be paroled after forty years for the 1979 murder of his wife, Angela.2
The judge insists Rory step in as his attorney for the final hearing; dropping the case is not an option. Mitchell, known as The Thief, was suspected of killing many more women that summer, though only one conviction stuck. Rory's dread surges, but so does a compulsive curiosity she cannot ignore.
This turn ensnares Rory in an ethical trap: her professional obligation to a client she loathes collides with a burgeoning need to understand what her father was hiding. The forced proximity to Thomas Mitchell will become the engine of revelation. Judge Boyle's pressure represents institutional inertia—once a secret is embedded in the legal system, it acquires a momentum that even death cannot halt. Rory's inherited role as defender of the man who will prove to be her origin's darkest figure is the novel's central irony.
Angela's Obsession
Angela Mitchell,2 a socially isolated woman with autism and OCD, becomes fixated on the women vanishing from Chicago's streets. She spends weeks in libraries, spinning microfilm, creating victim biographies, and plotting homicides on graph paper.
Her pattern reveals a spike in similar killings starting in 1970, followed by a sudden drop in 1979 — the year the bodies stopped being found. She theorizes the same man has been active for a decade but changed his disposal method after John Wayne Gacy's arrest heightened public vigilance. She calls him The Thief3 before the media does.
Angela's autistic fixation, pathologized by everyone around her, becomes a forensic superpower. Her mind's inability to let go of patterns—the very trait that isolates her—enables her to see what the police miss. The historical context of Gacy's discovery is crucial: it shows how a panicked city could overlook a quieter monster. Angela's graph is a pre-digital algorithm, a hand-drawn prototype of the Murder Accountability Project that Lane Phillips will one day build, connecting mother and daughter across time through a shared cognitive architecture.
Garage of Horrors
Cleaning the garage, Angela2 unearths a diamond-and-peridot necklace tucked inside an old picnic basket. A news report later describes a missing woman's identical necklace, with engraved initials. Angela checks: the engraving matches.
She then sneaks into her husband Thomas3's Kenosha warehouse, where she finds a locked storage room. Behind a pallet, she discovers an M-shaped wooden beam bolted to the ceiling, fitted with pulleys and two nylon nooses six feet apart. The horror crystallizes: Thomas3 is not just the killer, he has been hiding trophies in their home.
The garage, a liminal space between domestic safety and public exposure, becomes the site where Angela's two lives collide. The necklace is a perfect symbol: an object of affection repurposed as a serial killer's souvenir, the engraved initials transforming from personal memory tag to a record of predation. The warehouse contraption—medieval yet meticulously engineered—externalizes the ritual we witnessed in the prologue, grounding its abstract horror in wood and rope that Angela can touch. Her discovery is not deductive but sensory and spatial: she finds the truth by walking into it.
The Escape and the Evidence
Realizing Thomas3 has found her out, Angela2 stuffs the necklace and a victim's driver's license into an envelope and mails it to the Chicago police. She flees to Greta Schreiber,5 the nurse who once befriended her in a juvenile psychiatric hospital.
Greta5 helps push Angela's car into a reservoir to fake her death. The package arrives at the station, and detectives arrest Thomas3 for Angela's murder. Without a body, the jury convicts him of second-degree murder. He receives sixty years, though the other missing women's cases remain officially unsolved.
Angela's self-erasure is both strategic and sacrificial. To ensure Thomas's imprisonment, she must become legally dead, severing herself from any identity he could track. The mailed evidence package functions as a time capsule that will echo across decades—its contents eventually reexamined by Rory. The imperfect conviction (second-degree, no body) reflects the legal system's profound limitations when confronting a killer who weaponizes disappearance itself. Justice is partial; the truth, like Angela, remains buried.
Frank Moore's Fateful Discovery
In 1981, Frank Moore,4 a junior attorney at Garrison Ford, is assigned to Thomas3's appeal. Thomas hires him privately to find Angela,2 convinced she is alive. Frank traces her to Bayer Group Juvenile Psychiatric Facility, then to a nurse named Margaret 'Greta' Schreiber.5
At her farmhouse in Peoria, after being chased by dogs, Frank is eventually told the truth: Angela2 died in childbirth in Greta5's home, hemorrhaging during delivery. The infant survived. Greta5 introduces Frank to the baby girl. Frank4 makes a fateful decision: he will not tell Thomas.3 Instead, he and his wife Marla adopt the child, naming her Rory.1
This is the narrative's hidden genesis. Frank's choice rewrites three lives: his own, the child's, and Thomas's—whom he must now systematically deceive for decades. The adoption is both rescue and captivity; by protecting Rory, Frank chains himself to the man he most fears. His role shifts from legal advocate to guardian of a secret that will require an elaborate performance of ongoing searches, falsified reports, and manipulated parole appeals. The farmhouse, with its nursery lined by restored dolls, becomes the sanctuary where light is chosen over darkness.
The Friend Who Never Gave Up
In 2019, Rory1 tracks down Catherine Blackwell,7 now an elderly woman still running a Facebook page called 'Justice for Angela.' Catherine gives Rory Angela2's original binders: victim biographies, graphs, and a drawing of the dual-noose contraption.
She recounts that in 1981, a man named Frank Moore4 visited her, asking about Angela. Catherine7 always believed Thomas3 hired him to hunt her down, and that Angela2 is still alive, hiding somewhere. She asks Rory,1 a forensic expert, to continue the search.
Catherine's decades-long vigil transforms her from a minor figure into a moral witness. Her misinterpretation of Frank's motives—seeing him as a threat rather than a protector—creates a poignant dramatic irony that Rory, aware of her father's dual role, now begins to unravel. The binder passes from mother to stranger to daughter, an unbroken chain of evidence that will lead Rory not to a cold case solution, but to the discovery of her own origins. Catherine's hope, mistaken in its premise, nevertheless preserves the truth long enough for Rory to claim it.
The Safe-Deposit Revelation
Celia, Frank4's secret girlfriend and office administrator, gives Rory1 a key to a safe-deposit box Frank told her to hide if he ever died. Inside, Rory finds a birth certificate listing Greta Schreiber5 as birth mother and adoption papers naming Frank and Marla Moore as adoptive parents.
The pieces detonate: Greta5 is not her great-aunt; she is the nurse who delivered her and hid her. Angela Mitchell2 was her biological mother. The man she just agreed to represent, Thomas Mitchell,3 is her father.
Identity collapses in a single archival moment. Every assumption Rory held about her lineage, her inherited quirks, her occupation—all suddenly gain genetic logic. Her compulsion to reconstruct violent deaths, her doll-restoration precision, her social armor: these are not random traits but echoes of a mother whose mind worked identically and a father whose pathology lurks in her DNA. The safe-deposit box is a Pandora's vessel, but what it releases is not chaos—it is the missing piece that makes Rory's entire life legible.
The Killer's First Free Steps
On November 3, 2019, at 4:30 a.m., Rory1 and Lane6 drive Thomas Mitchell3 to his inherited cabin near Starved Rock. Hours later, Thomas spreads his notes and focuses on the name Margaret Schreiber.5
That night, he enters the nursing home, finds room 121, and smothers elderly Greta5 with her pillow as she mutters her dementia mantra about trying to save someone from too much blood. He then locates and abducts Catherine Blackwell,7 leaving a visitor log signed in his distinctive all-caps handwriting, where every A is an inverted V.
Thomas's immediate return to violence after four decades demonstrates the incorrigibility of his compulsion. Prison did not rehabilitate; it merely refined his patience. The killing of Greta is particularly savage because she poses no physical threat—she is killed for being a loose thread in a forty-year-old mystery. Her final words, 'I tried to save you,' spoken to a confused present but addressed to a long-dead Angela, become a posthumous confession of love and sacrifice that Thomas cannot hear but Rory will come to understand.
The Dream and the Shadow
After Greta5's funeral, Rory1 dreams she meets Camille Byrd9 in Grant Park. The dead girl holds the restored Kestner doll and says, 'The truth is easy to miss, even when it's right in front of us.' A halogen light casts Camille's shadow onto a wall, forming an inverted V.
Rory startles awake and races to the nursing home visitor log. Thomas3 signed in for 'MΛRGΛRET SCHREIBER,' the A's written as inverted V's — the same penmanship from his prison letters to Frank.4 He killed Greta,5 and Catherine7 is next.
The dream sequence operates as a psychological and possibly supernatural integration of Rory's subconscious pattern recognition. Camille, the case she neglected, becomes the messenger who delivers the crucial clue—a shadow that mirrors the inverted V of the A's. This symbolic penmanship had been present throughout the narrative, but only now, after the adoption revelation, does Rory's mind assemble it. The dream also suggests a spiritual exchange: Camille helps Rory, and in return, Rory will finally seek justice for her. The dead are not passive; they intervene.
The Pantry and the Noose
Rory1 sneaks through the forest to the cabin, discovering Catherine7's lifeless body on the screened porch, a noose already cinched around her neck. Rory hides in the kitchen pantry as Thomas3 returns, cranks Mozart's Requiem, and mounts his stool. He loops the second noose around his own neck and lowers himself, hoisting Catherine's body into the air.
As he approaches the brink of ecstasy, Rory emerges. She looks into his bulging, purple face and kicks the stool from beneath him. His body drops, the noose tightens, and he dies strangling. She dials his parole officer and leaves the phone off the hook, then flees.
This is the novel's moral crucible. Rory does not merely witness a murder—she converts the killer's own ritual into his execution. The choice is cold, premeditated, and irreversible. In that moment, she embodies both the darkness she inherited from Thomas and the fierce protective instinct of the mother she never knew. The blaring Requiem—a Mass for the dead—sanctifies the kill, transforming a cabin porch into a courtroom where the only verdict is death. Rory's act crosses the line between justice and vengeance, forcing the reader to inhabit the unsettling space where they feel indistinguishable.
Graves in the Clearing
The LaSalle County sheriff rules Thomas3's death a suicide based on the open phone line and the arrangement of the noose. Investigators find a plat of survey inside the cabin, a hand-drawn grid of rectangles covering the acreage behind the house, each labeled with a woman's name.
Excavation unearths the skeletons of the five missing women from 1979, identified by dental records. Their families, decades bereft of closure, finally hold funerals. Rory1 gives a brief, uneventful statement and returns home, where she burns her clothes and boots in the fireplace. The red clay that stained them turns to ash.
The mass grave is the novel's collective catharsis, but it is incomplete. Angela's body is never found, feeding public conspiracy theories and ensuring that the truth Rory now carries can never be fully buried or fully revealed. The red clay—the soil of Starved Rock that marked Rory's boots and the cabin floor—becomes a resonant symbol of violence absorbed into the earth itself. That she must burn her clothing to erase her presence underscores the price of her choice: like Angela before her, she must efface evidence of her own existence to remain safe.
Epilogue
Rory1 delivers the flawlessly restored Kestner doll to Walter Byrd at the library, promising that Camille9's case will now receive her full attention. Then she drives the long country road to the old farmhouse in Peoria. She walks to the back corner of the property, where, as a ten-year-old, she once found a pile of roses placed on the ground and inhaled their sweetness.
She knows now what she sensed then: this is Angela Mitchell2's unmarked grave. She removes her beanie and glasses, crouches down, and lays a fresh bouquet of roses on the earth. The scent rises around her like an answered prayer.
The epilogue completes Rory's journey from reconstructionist to inheritor. The roses, which Greta placed daily for forty years as a silent memorial, now pass to the daughter who never knew her mother alive. By removing her protective armor—the hat and glasses—Rory signals an internal transformation: she no longer needs to hide from the world or from her own identity. The gesture is not just remembrance but acceptance. The scent of roses, once a child's mysterious comfort, becomes a bridge between generations of women who chose light despite the darkness that pursued them.
Analysis
Some Choose Darkness operates as a double helix: a 1979 serial killer investigation and a 2019 forensic reconstruction, spiraling around the same hidden axis — the identity of a woman who vanished. The novel's title, borrowed from Lane Phillips6's thesis, posits that darkness is not merely a condition one is born into but a choice made repeatedly, sometimes by the same person across a single night, as Rory1's climactic act demonstrates. The book is particularly interested in how neurodivergence — autism, OCD, compulsive pattern recognition — can function as both vulnerability and superpower. Angela2 and Rory1 share a cognitive architecture that isolates them socially but equips them to perceive connections invisible to neurotypical minds. This genetic inheritance of perception becomes the novel's quietest and most profound plot twist: Rory's investigative gift is not learned but inherited, a maternal legacy passed through the very blood that also carries her father3's stain. The narrative structure itself enacts this theme of reconstruction. The reader, like Rory, assembles the truth from fragments scattered across decades, learning that Frank Moore4's entire career was a performance designed to keep a predator3 caged; that Greta5's nightly mutterings about too much blood were not dementia gibberish but testimony; that the roses on the prairie were a burial ritual sustained for forty years. The final moral question — was Rory justified in killing Thomas?3 — is left deliberately unlitigated, because the novel understands that some verdicts can only be rendered in the silent court of one's own conscience. The story argues that to reconstruct a truth is not necessarily to reveal it to the world; some truths, like Angela2's grave, are best marked only with roses, and some choices, once made, must be folded into the ash of a burned boot and carried alone.
Review Summary
Some Choose Darkness receives overwhelmingly positive reviews, averaging 4.23/5 stars. Readers praise Charlie Donlea's intricate storytelling featuring two brilliant autistic women—Rory Moore, a forensic reconstructionist, and Angela Mitchell from 1979—investigating a serial killer called "The Thief." Reviewers highlight the exceptional character development, dual timelines, dark atmosphere, and authentic autism representation. Many appreciate the well-plotted suspense and unexpected twists, though some figured out revelations early. The novel's strength lies in its compelling female protagonists who use their unique perspectives to solve crimes others miss. Most readers highly recommend this gripping, fast-paced thriller.
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Characters
Rory Moore
Forensic reconstructionist, reluctant heirA brilliant forensic reconstructionist who restores antique china dolls and solves cold cases for the Chicago PD. Rory is autistic, with obsessive-compulsive tendencies and severe social anxiety; she wears thick glasses, a beanie, and gray coats as psychic armor. Her mind catalogs and cross-references details that others miss, making her unmatched at piecing together crime scenes. After her father Frank4's sudden death, she is forced into proximity with a serial killer client3 and begins unraveling the secret that has defined her entire existence. Her emotional arc moves from isolated avoidance to a confrontation with her deepest origins.
Angela Mitchell
Autistic investigator, vanished wifeA socially withdrawn woman with autism and OCD who became the key to identifying Chicago's most notorious serial killer3. In 1979, Angela's obsessive pattern recognition enabled her to map a decade of hidden murders that police had failed to connect. Her husband was the killer3, and her discovery forced her to orchestrate her own disappearance. She possessed an uncanny memory and a fierce, if fragile, moral courage. The novel explores her psyche through her detailed research binders, revealing a mind that turned its pathological need for order into a weapon against chaos.
Thomas Mitchell
Serial killer, paroled predatorKnown as The Thief, Thomas terrorized Chicago in the summer of 1979, abducting and killing at least six women. His ritual involved a dual-noose pulley system that allowed him to experience a euphoric high—The Rush—by semi-strangling himself while his victim died suspended before him. Convicted of his wife Angela2's murder, he spent forty years in prison maintaining his innocence of the other deaths and obsessively plotting to find Angela, whom he believed was still alive. On the surface, he is calm, meticulous, and rehabilitated; underneath, the compulsion has only deepened with time.
Frank Moore
Defense attorney, secret protectorRory1's father and a criminal defense attorney who began his career at the prestigious Garrison Ford firm. He represented Thomas Mitchell3 on appeal and became his closest confidant inside prison. Unbeknownst to his client, Frank discovered that Angela2 had given birth before she died and that the child had survived. He and his wife Marla adopted the infant, raising her as Rory1, while Frank spent the next four decades pretending to search for Angela2, feeding Thomas3 false leads, and subtly sabotaging his parole attempts. His life was a high-wire act of deception to protect the daughter he loved.
Greta Schreiber
Elderly nurse, keeper of secretsA former nurse-midwife who befriended teenage Angela2 at Bayer Group Juvenile Psychiatric Facility and later became her only refuge. Greta hid Angela2 during her pregnancy, delivered her baby in secret, and after Angela's death from hemorrhage, raised the infant for a time before facilitating her adoption by the Moores4. In old age, she suffers from dementia and lives in a nursing home, her fragmented mind cycling through memories of that bloody night. To Rory1, she was always a beloved great-aunt who taught her doll restoration; the deeper relationship remained hidden.
Lane Phillips
Forensic psychologist, Rory's partnerA former FBI profiler and author of the seminal thesis 'Some Choose Darkness,' Lane now runs the Murder Accountability Project, an algorithm that identifies serial killer patterns. He is Rory1's longtime lover and the only person who truly understands her idiosyncrasies. Calm, supportive, and perceptive, he becomes her anchor as her world unravels, even helping her cover up evidence in the final crisis without asking for explanations.
Catherine Blackwell
Angela's loyal friend, lifelong seekerIn 1979, Catherine was Angela Mitchell2's only friend, the one person who treated her without condescension. She dismissed Angela's theories about The Thief3 just before the disappearance, a regret that has haunted her for forty years. Now elderly, she maintains a Facebook page called 'Justice for Angela,' convinced her friend is still alive and hiding. She entrusts Rory1 with Angela's original research binders, unwittingly handing over the keys to a much larger truth.
Ron Davidson
Homicide detective, Rory's bossHead of Chicago Homicide who keeps Rory1 on retainer for cold cases despite her difficult personality. He lured her back to work using Camille Byrd9's case and later provided her with the 1979 investigation files that catalyzed her personal quest.
Camille Byrd
Murder victim, spectral guideA twenty-two-year-old recent graduate strangled and left in Grant Park in 2018. Her father's plea for justice and her shattered childhood doll draw Rory1 into the case. Camille's spirit appears in a pivotal dream, offering the clue of the inverted V that cracks the central mystery, forging a supernatural bond between two women seeking peace.
Plot Devices
The Pulley Noose System
Killer's ritual apparatusAn M-shaped wooden beam with five pulleys and two nylon nooses six feet apart, used by Thomas Mitchell3 to semi-strangle himself while his victim hangs from the other end. The system converts his weight into a lever that slowly chokes his victim, while the pressure on his own neck produces a euphoric high he calls The Rush. Angela2 discovered a similar contraption in his warehouse, and he later rebuilds it at the Starved Rock cabin, where Rory1 finds Catherine Blackwell7's body suspended from it.
Angela's Research Binder
Archived forensic analysisA three-ring binder compiled by Angela Mitchell2 in 1979, containing victim biographies, newspaper clippings, a hand-drawn graph plotting homicides from 1960-1979, and a sketch of the dual-noose contraption. Catherine Blackwell7 preserved it for forty years and gives it to Rory1, creating a direct link between the two women. The binder's contents demonstrate Angela's pre-digital algorithmic thinking and later help Rory understand the full scope of Thomas3's crimes.
Safe-Deposit Box Documents
Bearer of hidden lineageA metal box in a bank vault, accessed by a key that Frank Moore4 gave to his girlfriend Celia with instructions to hide if he died. Inside are a birth certificate naming Greta Schreiber5 as mother and adoption papers listing Frank and Marla Moore as adoptive parents. These documents reveal that Rory1 is the daughter of Angela Mitchell2 and Thomas Mitchell3, collapsing her entire understanding of her identity and reframing every relationship in her life.
Camille Byrd's Kestner Doll
Restoration catalyst, supernatural messengerAn antique German china doll belonging to the murder victim Camille Byrd9, her father's most treasured memento. Rory1's meticulous repair of the doll's shattered eye socket and porcelain cheek becomes a parallel process to reconstructing Camille's murder. In a pivotal dream, Camille9 appears holding the restored doll, and her shadow—cast by a halogen lamp—forms an inverted V, providing the visual clue that unlocks the mystery of Thomas3's handwriting.
The Inverted V Penmanship
Forensic handwriting clueThomas Mitchell3's distinctive block lettering, where every capital A is written as an inverted V (Λ) with no crossbar. This quirk appears in his prison letters to Frank Moore4 and later in the nursing home visitor log, where he signed in as 'MΛRGΛRET SCHREIBER.' Rory1's recognition of this visual signature—triggered by Camille9's dream—allows her to identify Thomas3 as Greta5's killer and connects her own shadow observed in an alley to the paternal mark she carries unknowingly.
Rory Moore/Lane Phillips Series
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