Four Corners of Night: A Novel (2025)

My mind is blown that so many readers gave this book three stars or less. This is one of those rare mystery books--a title few people have heard of by an author few people have heard of, yet it's better than most of the mysteries on today's top ten lists. I have to admit that I've read other books by Holden and didn't care much for them, but this one is superb; the writing is amazing, the characters are lifelife, and the plot has a very interesting twist at the end that shows just how un-"black and white" the world is. A true gem among mysteries!

About a hundred years ago, when I was still in college, a friend bought me a mystery novel - and I was hooked. I have always been a hard-core devotee of speculative fiction (science fiction/fantasy), but I'll read pretty much anything that grabs me, and mysteries - particularly police procedurals - have for a long time now run a close second to my beloved SF. The best ones, though, are not just whodunnits - they delve into the dark night of the psyche at the same time as they dig into the crime that forms the book's foundation.

Four Corners of Night is one of the best. Told through three different timelines - the childhood and early friendship of the narrator and his best friend/sometime partner, the unsolved kidnapping of the friend's daughter about seven years in the past, and the present day, in which another girl has gone missing, with frightening connections to the old crime -- the narrative cuts back and forth between them*, tying together the consequences of the past with the current puzzle.

* No signal is provided at the beginning of a chapter as to which timeline it covers - e.g., a date heading or other indicator - which some readers may find annoying or difficult to follow.

Holden does a bravura job of exploring the sometimes-unexplainable nature of human relationships, and portrays the police officers not as saints or monsters, but sometimes a combination of the two, and primarily as human and fallible. I particularly appreciated his depiction of how the main character, Mack, falls into a job as a police officer: still in school and unenthusiastic about pursuing a future career as an attorney, his childhood best friend Bank comes back into his life at a pivotal moment, and Mack abandons his education to join the force shortly after Bank does. On the surface, Mack is the brains of their partnership, and Bank the brawn, but Mack is fully aware he will never have the instinctive feel for police work - especially the art of cultivating relationships on the street - that Bank seems to come by naturally.

Holden shows the ebb and flow of the friendship between the two men over time: sometimes working side by side, day after day; sometimes estranged by distance or circumstance; but always a solid fact, resuming virtually unchanged despite a period of separation. At the same time, their individual stories are no open book, and even such a life-long pair have secrets from each other - and therein lies the heart of this book.

Mystery novel about a missing child. Well-written, but emotionally draining.

Outstanding read

Took a bit to get into the flow of the book but then couldn't put it down. Intense thriller whose ending I couldn't have guessed. Thoroughly enjoyed.

While this gave a well detailed look at a mid-Ohio mid-sized metropolitan turn-of-the-century life (20th-21st), it touched on mostly the ugly parts. The quality was so descriptive that the author made you feel you were there, but made it so vivid that you didn’t want to be. It’s a procedural cop drama with some twists at the end that make you think. It may make a decent movie, or with some sanitizing, a made-for-tv movie but would probably be better as an episode of Law and Order SVU.

J’ai trouvé ça pénible à lire. La fin est totalement téléphonée : j’ai eu aucune surprise. Pas une grande lecture.

This was an excellent mystery/character study, just the way I like them. I'm reading "The River Sorrow" and it doesn't seem to have been written by the same person. "Four Corners" is written in the first person and "Sorrow" isn't, which may account for some of the difference between them. But I'll say more about that when I review "Sorrow."

This is partly a police procedural and centers on a kidnapping--actually two of them, seven years apart. The story is seen through the eyes of the narrator, Mack, but is mainly about his best friend, Bank. They're both police officers and very different people. This is a psychological study as much as anything. But there's a good mystery at the core of it, too.

One thing that was interesting to me was that it was set in Ohio in a fictional city somewhere near Toledo. I'm from Ohio and I understand that Holden is from Toledo. He did a good job of making the city seem real, much like Ed McBain does with his fictional city. It might be hard to write about a real place for fear that you won't get every detail right, but I think it's even harder to make a fictional place seem so real, you feel you could go there and find your way around.

Mack and Bank are cops in a city located in a Midwestern U.S. city (I think it’s Ohio). The setting is one of those U.S. cities that was built around the factories that once made the country thrive. I liked how the author describes the evolution of the city and its expansion into suburbia, its eventual corrosion, and the different ethnic peoples who populated different sections only to be replaced by others with less means as the decline progresses. Although you get detailed descriptions of the demography, you still don’t know exactly where this is. It can be anywhere America.
Mack and Bank go way back to when they were kids so the story goes moves between their pasts and the present. In the present they are looking for a teenage girl abducted under very suspicious circumstances. There are connections to this disappearance and that of Bank’s daughter a few years earlier. The book is suspenseful in both the present case but also in its delving into the relationship between the two guys and their families and their friendship which carries dark secrets. You ride along with these guys as you get a picture of how they work and how they’ve always worked. You get to see them in their home lives which gives a really good picture of who these guys are.
Another thing I appreciated about the story is the depiction of Mack’s home life. He’s married to a woman who handles being married to a city cop pretty well as she raises their two sons and Mack’s daughter from a previous relationship. His wife described as being physically normal which her husband appreciates. I mean, in a lot of books they guy is always married to a tall, slender, well-built, Barbie doll-like woman which would usually make me roll my eyes.
There are some triggers such as child molestation and child prostitution,
I initially gave this a four-star rating which is pretty good in my book. But as I wrote my review, I found myself upping it to five.

Read this one in French and first of all I was pretty unimpressed with a specific aspect of either the writing or the translation. For the sake of argument, I'll assume it's the translation. We've definitively got a problem with how the tenses are used in this one.
I'm a sucker for language(s) but I'm usually not shocked by small issues in verb tense consistency. But here, it was a bit too obvious even for my taste. This would've been probably fine IF the story didn't keep hopping from one timeline to another without any typographical help. The intertwinement of stories, girls and badly chosen verb tenses made it very difficult to figure out when the current paragraph was taking place. (Cf. first season of The Witcher but with badly conjugated verbs!)

THAT SAID
The thriller/investigation is slow going but installs characters and backstories complex enough that you want to keep reading. I wouldn't say I was 100% hooked like when you immediately drown in the book and live for another page but you still want to know more each step of the way.
Two mysterious disappearances (kids as well!) years apart? Yup, my kind of thing! But in the end this book isn't really about where they are or exactly what happened, it is about a long lasting, dysfunctional and ill-balanced friendship between two men, broken families, doubts and certitude but love still among the characters. How to accept difficult truths too.
Overall this wasn't the best crime novel but a good and pretty impressive and beautiful thriller one.

Three plus stars. It's unfortunate that I read this right after a Tess Gerritsen, which fully captivated me, and when I am in such a rotten mood.

Let me whinge a bit, I have a staph infected toe, going on 30 days tomorrow, third anti-biotic, I was supposed to close on my house and be off to Virginia 3 weeks ago and do not currently have a closing date (the buyer is solid, don't know what is going on ). My husband has been in Virginia for 3 months now. Cold and flu season is in full swing and next in the next week there will be no school for 3 out of 6 days, one of which will be an early out. My autistic kiddo is not rolling with this any better than I am.

So ... now that that is off my chest, back to the book. It was a good enough mystery, though I suspected the big twist I wasn't sure but mostly that seemed to be due to the back and forthing between decades and mysteries. This read sad and dark to me and the more I got to know our flawed protagonists the sadder and heavier it felt so it never really grabbed me. I apologize for the lame review but ... did I mention I'm in a rotten mood so probably the less said the better?

Four Corners of the Night was ultimately a good story for readers who enjoy the crime/thriller genre. It had potential to be a great book. The writing and the structure is where I had difficulty. The story jumped around constantly to different time periods. In general I am okay with this, a lot of writers do this. The problem with this book is that it was never made clear when this was happening. Often it wasn’t until i was well into a new chapter that I realised the time period had changed. I found this frustrating. The author also got sidetracked by giving us paragraphs of information about the history of the city where the story was set. I understand this is the city he comes from and this information may be interesting to readers also from this area, but for me it added nothing to the story and was a boring unnecessary distraction. The use of the word “lighted” rather than “lit” annoyed me as well. The story itself is great with some unexpected twists that surprise. The underlying themes are dark and perhaps a little disturbing

Mack and Bank are two cops who have been friends, off and on, since they were about nine years old. The disappearance of a young girl brings up similarities to the disappearance of Bank's step-daughter seven years before. Bank has cultivated many CIs over the years and so he cruises the back alleys in the dead of night to get information and tips as well as putting some heavy-handed moves on people who may reveal the whereabouts of young Tamara.

The action shifts back and forth from the present to Mack's recollections of Bank's behaviour when his step-daughter Jamie disappeared and Bank's subsequent depression and (to be continued)

Loved this one. I felt I was on those dark streets, brazen in the deep secrets of the park, strong as a bull and persistent as a rat. A cop like that with torments too great to bare, too heavy to bear, but a hero.

3,5/5
Un bon policier pour commencer l'année. Le début il faut un peu s'accrocher avec les aller-retours entre présent et passé mais l'avantage c'est que nous plongeons dans l'enfance des personnages et qu'ils sont bien aboutis pour nous montrer toute leur complexité.

Very slow police procedural. The book builds and then really speeds through in the last couple of chapters. I felt it was pretty boring and hard to get in to the story.

Didn't See It Coming

Excellent read! I was engaged and surprised throughout. Craig Holden does a wonderful job with place and dialogue. Highly recommended.

Two missing girls, 7 years apart, and partners on the force friends from Elem school. One old, one introspective. Parts a little too contrived, but ok if willing to suspend disbelief.

3 1/2 to 4 Stars

phenomenal and surprising

This book kept me interested from beginning to the end. I never knew what to expect and it had a lot of moments of shock. I enjoyed getting to know back stories of the characters as well.

Held my attention from start to finish. I love the characters in the book. The ending made me sad. Happy and made me want to cry.

I’ve never “not finished” a book; but I DID consider that option.
So much going on at the beginning; yet it moved so S-L-O-W-L-Y. Then the end, with the surprising(?) twist, seemed rushed.

Plutôt bien dans l'ensemble avec une bonne intrigue. Quelques passages sont toutefois un peu mou.

Not your usual murder mystery/thriller. A few slow spots. Dark, but beautifully written.

This wasn't a bad book but it wasn't great either... It just didn't suck me in!

Like another person who rated Four Corners of Night, I can't believe this book doesn't have better ratings. For starters, I loved the following:

Holden's literary style - beautiful
The mystery
The psychological twists and turns
The character development
The descriptive settings
The different vantage points, time span and more.

A brief summary: a recent kidnapping takes cops Bank and Mack back seven years to another kidnapping - that of Bank's own daughter. The two events have eerie connections, and the electrifying conclusion works well, leaving the reader satisfied. Nicely done, Holden. I'll be reading more from you. 5/5 stars.

Au fil des pages, l'auteur nous fait vivre en parallèle deux enquêtes similaires, deux enlèvements de fillettes qui rappellent aux deux protagonistes principaux de vieux démons passés et qui se retrouvent inextricablement liées. Mais ici, l'on s'intéresse surtout aux personnages eux mêmes, à leur quotidien, aux origines de leur profonde amitié et à leur psychologie que Craig Holden décrit avec une rare justesse et qui donne toute sa force au livre.
L'intrigue, elle, est menée avec suffisamment d'efficacité, à défaut d'inventivité pour garantir un plaisir de lecture assuré.

The title says it all: this is a dark, bleak book that succeeds in showing glints of humanity among the tragic lives of the characters. Singular in tone, life is a weight to all of its characters, not by choice or action, but by circumstance. A very compelling, if slightly long, read.

The story relies on a couple of broad ideas, but if they don't throw you, there's a very grounded story about friendship and family in this novel.

Set in Toledo. Although the city isn't named, it's very obvious. Holden made some changes in geography, so that's likely why Toledo isn't Toledo. For example, Ottawa Hills is called Heron Hills. But it's just a neighborhood within the city, rather than a separate entity, so that the city police could have jurisdiction there. Anyway, it's a good book and some of you might find it especially interesting because of the location. Btw, Holden's Narcissist's Daughter is also a Toledo story.

A very messy book and i mean that in a good way. Nominally a mystery book but the mystery is perhaps the weakest part of the story. The book's strengths lay in the grittiness of the characters and the author's refusal to take the easy way out on anything. Also, i liked that the story was told through the eyes of the straight arrow character so the motivations of the more fully realized characters are always elusive. Worth the time if this is the kind of book that interests you.