Paula McLain’s When the Stars Go Dark (2021) is the story of a 30-something San Francisco police detective struggling to come to terms with her role in the accidental death of her two-year-old daughter. The novel is an intricate police procedural into the perplexing coincidence of multiple missing teenage girls across two decades, all centered around the quiet coastal town of Mendocino in Northern California. Detective Anna Hart, who specializes in missing children cases, returns home to Mendocino to escape the pressures of her collapsing marriage, only to find herself entangled in the investigation into two local missing girls. The case may have ties to another missing teenage girl, a friend of Anna’s whose disappearance and murder occurred when Anna was in high school. Although officially on leave, Anna can’t not get involved in the investigation, helping her high school friend, now the town’s sheriff, in a race against time to piece together a profile of what appears to be a serial killer.

The novel fuses the fictional stories of these missing teenage girls with accounts of real-life crimes involving missing and abused children to explore the reality of sexual violence against children, what author McLain describes in her Author’s Note as “the door we don’t want to open” (367). In addition to examining the trauma of these teenage victims, in the story of Anna Hart, a grieving mother, the novel explores grief and The Trauma of Loss, specifically the experience of a parent losing a child. The novel also explores the themes of The Recovery of Hope, The Power of Intuition, and how a person experiencing by trauma reclaims the gift of trusting others.

This study guide uses the 2022 Ballantine paperback edition.

Content Warning: The source material revolves around abduction and murder and references sexual abuse and trauma as well as suicide.

Plot Summary

It is 1993. San Francisco Detective Anna Hart leaves her husband and son to return home to Mendocino, a secluded coastal town in northern California, to sort through the implications of the death of her two-year-old daughter, an accident for which she nevertheless feels responsible. Her professional background is in handling cases involving missing or abused children. She leads with her heart, always feeling deeply for these children, perhaps because of her own childhood growing up in a series of foster homes, each a trauma, before being adopted by a caring and loving couple in Mendocino, Hep Strater, a forest ranger, and his wife, Eden, both dead now.

Shortly after arriving in Mendocino, Anna hears about the disappearance of 15-year-old Cameron Curtis, the adopted daughter of a prominent Hollywood power couple. Evidence begins to suggest that Cameron had been sexually abused by her biological and her adoptive father, a powerful movie producer. For reasons she cannot entirely explain, Anna feels emotional ties to the missing girl.

For Anna, the circumstances recall the case of Jenny Ford, a friend of Anna’s who disappeared when they were in high school in 1973. Her body was recovered, but the case went cold. Intuiting the two cases might be related, Anna offers to help Sheriff Will Flood, another friend from high school. Anna finds out that Will, as well a friend of Jenny’s, has never given up hope of finding the girl’s killer.

Anna is alarmed when two additional local teenage girls go missing, Polly Klaas, who was kidnapped during a sleepover in nearby Petaluma, and Shannan Russo, a troubled girl who may have run away from a dysfunctional home. Local media raises the possibility of a serial killer. As the investigation drags on for days, Anna enlists the help of a local psychic Tally Hollander, who shares with Anna her own visions about the missing teens—visions that become progressively more accurate and helpful.

As Anna continues in her own diligent investigation, she begins to dream of unsettling realities about her own childhood that suggest the experiences of being shuttled between foster homes may have damaged her in ways she has not yet dealt with. The memories are difficult, but she understands after years of helping teenagers and parents sort through the trauma of dysfunctional families and a broken foster care system that she cannot afford to ignore her memories.

Then, Shannan’s body is found. Evidence points to a single assailant, working alone, a man most likely of some strength and with some background in survival training.

Anna attempts to rally community support to find Cameron. On a hunch prompted by an ad in a local coffee shop offering help for aspiring models, detectives zero in on Caleb Ford, Jenny’s twin brother and a friend of Anna and Will’s, a professional photographer and part-time artist. Under arrest, Caleb confesses to kidnapping Cameron, but he escapes from the police before revealing where he is keeping her. The search is frustrating. Piecing together evidence they recover from Caleb’s apartment, the police locate a terrified and exhausted Cameron in the woods outside Mendocino. The items recovered from Caleb’s apartment suggest that Caleb might be tied to more than a half dozen missing girl cold cases.

The search for Caleb stretches on for several unsettling days before he appears at the cabin that Anna is renting. In a candid confession, Caleb admits to strangling Jenny in 1973 after she told him she planned to leave Mendocino without him. Over the next two decades, before and after his tour of duty in the Army, Caleb suggests darkly that he abducted and killed other teenage girls. But when Caleb makes a move to strangle Anna, Anna uses her service revolver and kills Caleb.

With Cameron safe, the murder of Jenny officially closed, and Will now committed to sorting through Caleb’s life with the hope of closing other cases of missing girls, Anna understands what she must do. With the encouragement of the psychic, Anna packs to return to San Francisco to begin the work of restoring her marriage and becoming the mother her seven-month-old son needs.