“Later that day the cops would crawl over the intricacies of his life and discover he was into pirates because he had been born with only one eye, and his mother peddled the romance of a cutlass and eye patch because often for kids like him the flair of fiction dulled a reality too severe.”
That’s the fourth paragraph of Chris Whitaker’s novel All the Colors of the Dark. This is a story that will haunt me for a long time—so well written and so intense.
The story begins when Patch, the pirate boy, was 13. Early in this 500-page novel, Patch interrupts an abduction of a girl from his school, is stabbed in the process, and taken prisoner by the abductor. He spends months underground in a pitch-dark bunker and only survives because another girl, Grace, is imprisoned with him. She takes care of him, encourages him to exercise and distracts him with descriptions of places she’s been and things she’s learned in school.
After months of searching for Patch, the police move on, but Saint is determined to find him. When Patch is rescued, Grace and the abductor disappear, leaving Patch to spend the next 30 years looking for her. He becomes a famous painter as he works to paint a face he has only seen with his fingers. When he calls Saint in the middle of sleepless nights, she records the details of the conversations he had with Grace.
The book jacket says this is “a missing person mystery, a serial killer thriller, and a love story about what lurks in the shadows of obsession and the blinding light of hope.”
If you’re looking for a book that you won’t be able to put down, then you must read All the Colors of the Dark by Chris Whitaker.