Submission 4002

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Author: Rebecca Hannigan

Published: 2026

Genre: CrimeandDetective

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This book is handpicked by the IBC Editorial Team. If you are an author, publisher, or reader and would like to have a book reviewed by IBC, you may reach us at editorial@indianbookclub.com — we’ll be happy to review it.

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Darkrooms by Rebecca Hannigan is a slow-burning, atmospheric Irish noir that announces a significant new voice in literary crime fiction. Set in the claustrophobic small town of Bannakilduff, the novel opens on a wound that has never healed: the disappearance of nine-year-old Roisin O'Halloran into the notorious Hanging Woods on the night of the Summer Solstice, 1999. Twenty years on, the town still carries the weight of that unanswered question, and so do the two women at the novel's centre. Moving between dual timelines and perspectives, Hannigan constructs a story drenched in dread, grief, and the suffocating grip of secrets kept too long. Darkrooms is not a thriller that races; it seeps, lingers, and unsettles.

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The novel alternates between two timelines: the summer of 1999, when nine-year-old Roisin vanished, and December 2019, when the past catches up with the people she left behind. In the present, Caitlin is adrift. She has spent two decades putting as much distance as possible between herself and Bannakilduff, drifting through temporary jobs, temporary lives, and the particular numbness of someone who has long stopped expecting anything to last. When her mother dies suddenly, she has no choice but to return to the town she fled, back to the streets that remember her, and back to the guilt she has carried without ever quite naming it. Because Caitlin was with Roisin on that last day. She walked into the Hanging Woods alongside her. And only one of them walked out. Deedee, Roisin's older sister, has never stopped looking. Now, a Garda, though barely holding the role together beneath the weight of her grief and a creeping dependence on alcohol, she has spent years circling the same unanswered questions. Caitlin's return to Bannakilduff feels like the first real opportunity she's had in years: to finally press, to finally know. What the two women discover, as they circle each other with suspicion and barely suppressed rage, is that the truth of what happened in the Hanging Woods is more layered and more painful than either of them had allowed themselves to imagine. Hannigan peels back both women with remarkable precision, their flaws, their damage, and the ways they have each coped (or failed to cope) with what they know. She weaves the 1999 timeline into the present with careful precision, releasing just enough information to keep the reader constantly recalibrating. The small-town setting where everyone knows your history, where gossip moves faster than grief, is rendered with an intimacy that feels deeply lived in. And beneath the mystery itself runs something rawer: a sustained examination of what it means to survive something, to carry it, and to reckon with it long after the world has moved on.

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- “The persistence of trauma”: Darkrooms is interested less in whodunit and more in what damage looks like twenty years on. Both Caitlin and Deedee are portraits of women shaped and in some ways broken by a single event in childhood. Hannigan asks, quietly and insistently, why those who suffer are expected to carry the weight of their worst experiences while others walk away untouched. - “The moral complexity of survival”: Caitlin resists easy categorisation as victim or villain, and that ambiguity is the novel's sharpest achievement. She is not sympathetic in any conventional sense, but she is deeply human. The book refuses to flatten its women into roles they don't fit. - “Secrets and small-town silence”: Bannakilduff is a place that prefers the past buried. The social architecture of the small town, the watchfulness, the long memories, the communal pressure to maintain a certain story, is rendered as suffocating as the landscape itself. - “Grief and its distortions”: Deedee's grief is not soft or redemptive. It is chaotic, self-destructive, and corrosive. Her relationship with alcohol is depicted without sentimentality as a slow unravelling that she has convinced herself is a form of coping, even as it undoes her. - “Childhood and its shadows”: The 1999 timeline captures something true and unsettling about the way children absorb the adult world, its violence, its dysfunction, its secrets, without the framework to process any of it. Roisin's disappearance is inseparable from everything else happening in that summer, and Hannigan handles this connection with real craft.

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- The Hanging Woods. More than a setting, the Woods function almost as a character in their own right. The name alone carries a mythology, and Hannigan leans into that with intent. Every scene that returns there is thick with unease, the kind that doesn't announce itself but settles in the body. - Deedee's unravelling. Watching Deedee convince herself that one drink will sharpen her focus is one of the novel's most quietly devastating recurring beats. The reader can see exactly what she cannot, and Hannigan never overplays the tragedy of it. There's a restraint here that makes the character's decline feel real and genuinely hard to witness. - Caitlin as an unlikely anchor. For a character with, by her own admission, few redeeming qualities, Caitlin is oddly compelling, perhaps because she never performs innocence. She doesn't ask to be liked, and that refusal feels like its own kind of honesty. - The dual timeline structure. The interplay between 1999 and 2019 is handled with precision. Rather than using the past timeline simply as backstory, Hannigan allows it to breathe and build independently, so that when the two strands converge, the impact is earned rather than manufactured. - The final act. Without spoiling what unfolds, the novel's closing stretch delivers both unexpected turns and genuine emotional weight, a combination that is harder to achieve than it sounds.

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Darkrooms is for readers who want their crime fiction literary, where the atmosphere is as important as the plot, and where character is the real engine of suspense. If you're drawn to morally complex, deeply flawed women at the centre of a story, to Irish settings rendered with texture and authenticity, and to mysteries that are as much about psychological excavation as they are about answers, this novel will stay with you. It's an ideal read for fans of Tana French's Dublin Murder Squad series, Flynn Berry, or Liz Nugent writers who treat crime as a lens through which to examine grief, identity, and the particular violence of silence. Go in knowing it is a slow burn. The rewards it offers are not those of a pacy thriller; they are deeper, stranger, and considerably harder to shake.

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This review is part of the Indian Book Club’s editorial initiative to spotlight books that inspire, inform, and leave a lasting impact on readers. Every title featured is carefully handpicked and reviewed by the IBC Editorial Team to maintain quality, authenticity, and literary value. If you are an author, publisher, or reader and would like to submit a book for review, we’d be delighted to hear from you. Please write to us at: editorial@indianbookclub.com Our team personally evaluates each submission, and selected books are featured as official IBC Editorial Reviews on our platform.