Love in a Dark Place

A Novel

Geoffrey Douglas

October 2017, north of Boston. The body of a 60-year-old drug addict and former prostitute is pulled from the Shawsheen River. The only person questioned is a former lover from decades before, now an aging English professor at a nearby college. The death is ruled accidental.

August 1984, Atlantic City. Ten casinos are taking in $5 million a day; the Bruno crime family, following a deadly mob war, is in control of the city’s rackets: loan-sharking, protection, fight-fixing, high-end prostitution. Among its most prized assets is a 28-year-old, $1,000-a-night escort named Sarah—beautiful and spirited, but deeply guarded, tethered to her mob bosses by an unknowable secret.

Harry Hopper, a local news reporter known for his deep digs into the resort’s darkest corners, comes to know her and is soon obsessed with the shadows she casts, then with Sarah herself. The two become lovers.

But the secrets don’t yield. And the dangers are too great. The years pass. There is an ending. Then a new beginning--but in a very different world.

Geoffrey Douglas is the author of five nonfiction books, all widely reviewed. One of them, The Game of Their Lives, was adapted for a 2005 movie of the same name. He has also worked as a reporter, columnist, editor and publisher, and is the author of many magazine pieces. For several years through the 1980s, he was editor of an investigative weekly in Atlantic City, an experience that provided much of the material for Love in a Dark Place, his first work of fiction. He lives today in New Hampshire.