Skip to main content
PBS logo
 
 

Book Review of Alone at Night (A Mars Bahr Mystery)

Alone at Night (A Mars Bahr Mystery)
Spuddie avatar reviewed Sadly, the last in this great series on + 412 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 1


#4 (and as far as I can tell, the last) in the Mars Bahr police procedural series set in Minneapolis. This book tells a case that Mars & Nettie are working on as part of the Cold Case Unit, this one investigating three unsolved convenience store abductions from years previously. The one that intrigues and haunts Mars is the one where a body was never found, having occurred 19 years previously when a seventeen-year-old student named Andrea Bergstad disappeared from the isolated, rural One Stop where she was about to finish her shift.

There were precious few clues even back then, and Mars heads back to Redstone Township to talk with the then-sheriff, Sig Sampson, to get a better feel for the case. Of course digging in the past can often dredge up things that someone doesn't want brought to light, and it's not long before Mars believes there is a present-day tie to the case that might be dangerous for anyone looking to discover what really happened to Andrea.

This was an excellent entry in the series, although I have mixed feelings about the ending. I wonder whether the author knew this would be the last book--though with several things not resolved, I can't help but think not. It always saddens me when a series that I started out being slightly ambivalent about begins to blossom and then just drops off the face of the earth just as I'm getting truly addicted to it. I keep hoping there will be more.