In the Dark

The novel opens with a first-person narrator in the remote northern British Columbia town of Kluhane Bay, recovering from a head wound and hoarding food after fifteen days in the wilderness. Constable Birken "Hubb" Hubble escorts the narrator to the local Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) detachment for a formal interview with Sergeant Mason Deniaud, a veteran homicide detective who recently transferred to this isolated posting. The narrator's identity is withheld as the story unfolds across three alternating timelines: the events at a wilderness lodge, the subsequent search and rescue operation, and the present-day interview.

In the lodge timeline, a group of professionals accepts an all-expenses-paid trip to the Forest Shadow Wilderness Resort and Spa, organized by the RAKAM Group out of Malaysia. They travel by bus to the Thunderbird Ridge resort north of Squamish and board a floatplane. The guests include Dan Whitlock, a private investigator; Monica McNeill, CEO of the Holistic Foods grocery chain, and her husband Dr. Nathan McNeill, a professor specializing in fungi; Katie Colbourne, an ex-television reporter turned documentarian who films the trip with a small waterproof camcorder; Deborah Strong, a housekeeping-company owner; Jackie Blunt, who runs a security firm; Bart Kundera, a transit-company owner; and Dr. Steven Bodine, a cosmetic surgeon. Amanda Gunn, the tour guide hired by the RAKAM Group, coordinates the trip.

On flight day, Whitlock falls ill and cannot board. Pilot Stella Daguerre discovers Steven was not on her manifest, and the de Havilland Beaver floatplane seats only eight including her; without Whitlock, Steven fits. Shortly after takeoff, Amanda learns Whitlock has died of anaphylactic shock. When she calls her RAKAM contact, a recording says the number is no longer in service.

The lodge looks nothing like the brochure: It is a dark, weathered building at the foot of a granite mountain, fronted by decaying totem poles. Jackie forces Stella to admit the plane's radio wires were deliberately cut, meaning no one knows their location. Steven and Nathan find a bag of groceries purchased a month earlier at a store in Vancouver's Kitsilano neighborhood: strawberry-flavored cereal, organic eggs, and a Snickers bar. These items privately horrify Steven, Nathan, and Monica, who share an unspoken connection to them. Katie finds a large oil painting in her bedroom depicting a girl identical to her six-year-old daughter, holding a golden scale of justice with a tiny human heart in one bowl.

That evening, Jackie discovers a typed rhyme inside an Agatha Christie novel on the coffee table, beside a stone checkerboard holding nine carved figurines. The rhyme begins, "Nine Little Liars thought they'd escaped. / One missed a plane, and then there were eight" (101), and continues through verses ending in total elimination. One figurine is already decapitated. Bart realizes RAKAM is an anagram of KARMA. The group grasps they have been lured here for a reckoning.

That night, Jackie sneaks out to check the radio and is stabbed to death in the cockpit. By morning, the plane has been cut free and blown down the lake, and a second figurine is decapitated. The group fractures under suspicion. They search in pairs, leaving Deborah behind due to her injured ankle. Bart is killed by a meat cleaver thrown into his skull. Katie is later found hanging in her locked room, the painting slashed to ribbons below her. That night, Steven falls violently ill after eating stew laced with death cap mushrooms. Nathan, the fungi specialist, explains that without treatment the toxin will destroy Steven's liver within weeks.

Through private conversations among the group, the central secret emerges. Fourteen years earlier, Steven was driving Monica's blue BMW in Vancouver's Kitsilano neighborhood when he struck and killed six-year-old Ezekiel Marshall and fled the scene. A young sex worker on the street corner witnessed the crash, took the boy's backpack and the car's vanity license plate, and disappeared. Nathan discovered the damaged BMW and had it secretly repaired and sold by Bart. Jackie and Whitlock worked together to pay off and silence the witness. Stella Daguerre is Estelle Marshall, Ezekiel's mother. After losing everything, she befriended Franz Gottman, an elderly billionaire and former reality-television creator, on Galiano Island off the British Columbia coast. Gottman became a paternal figure and helped Stella design the scheme, inspired by Agatha Christie, to confront everyone connected to her son's death. He financed private investigators to track them down but died of cancer before the plan was executed. Stella followed through alone.

The five survivors write and sign a note for rescuers and leave the lodge on foot, heading west toward Kluhane Bay. Someone tears the note from the notebook before they depart.

In the search timeline, Mason investigates after hunters discover the floatplane in a ravine along the Taheese River. Callie Sutton, the local search and rescue manager whose husband has a traumatic brain injury and remains in a vegetative state, becomes Mason's partner. The body in the wreck is identified as Jackie Blunt, not Stella, with a hunting knife in her neck, confirming homicide. Mason and Callie develop a bond over shared grief: Mason lost his wife and son in a car accident two years earlier.

Callie recognizes the photoshopped lodge images as depicting the north end of Taheese Lake and leads the team there. At the lodge, they find the crime scene: two bodies in a chest freezer, the checkerboard with decapitated figurines, and the death cap mushrooms. The team tracks the survivors through punishing mountain terrain. A military helicopter with infrared detection locates wolf activity ahead. At a grove, they find three bodies: Nathan, shot through the neck; Steven, shot and jaundiced from liver failure; and a female, shot in the back and mutilated by wolves.

At a cliff edge, Callie rappels down and finds Deborah alive on a ledge, injured but conscious. Deborah claims she is twelve weeks pregnant and says Stella drowned in a river.

The present-day interview reveals the narrator is Deborah. She claims Stella masterminded everything and executed the others in the grove before Deborah struck her with a rock and fled. Deborah also admits she was the missing witness to the hit-and-run: a teenage sex worker named Katarina Vasiliev who took Ezekiel's backpack and was paid off by Jackie, working on behalf of Whitlock and Steven's lawyer. Mason lets Deborah leave but reveals Stella has been found alive at the local clinic. Deborah rushes to the hospital and tries to disconnect Stella's ventilator, whispering she cannot let Stella take away the life she has built. Constable Podgorsky, hidden behind a curtain on Mason's orders, arrests her. Stella dies shortly after from a hemorrhagic stroke caused by prior head trauma, unrelated to Deborah's attempt.

Footage from Katie's waterproof camcorder, recovered from the river, reveals the truth. Stella confesses on camera that she planted all the props and sabotaged the radio but states, "I did not kill anyone. Not directly" (372). She poisoned Whitlock with shellfish allergens but committed no other murders. The camera captured Deborah forcing Katie onto a chair at knifepoint, threatening Katie's daughter, and kicking the chair away. It also captured footage of Deborah shooting Steven. DNA from the hunting knife and fingerprints from the meat cleaver match Deborah, linking her to Jackie's and Bart's murders. Her sealed criminal record, a conviction for stabbing another sex worker, is unsealed upon arrest. Flashback chapters confirm Deborah shot Steven, Nathan, and Monica in the grove, struck Stella with the rifle butt, and chased her into the river. Stella survived and dragged herself to a hunter's shelter.

In a final dreamlike sequence, the dying Stella reunites with her son in her mind, having found not revenge but the release of forgiveness. The novel closes with Mason hosting a fried-chicken lunch for Callie's eight-year-old son, Ben, and his school class at the RCMP station. Mason has begun to settle into Kluhane Bay, his grief shifting from debilitating to companionable. He and Callie acknowledge the bond between them, and the evidence ensures Deborah will face charges for multiple murders.