Vera Kurian's debut novel, NEVER SAW ME COMING, was nominated for an Edgar Award. She now makes her triumphant return with A STEP PAST DARKNESS, a chilling, atmospheric thriller that is about a town controlled by its megachurch and the dangerous lives of those unwilling to bend to its power.

Devil’s Peak, home to a once-prosperous coal mine, has long divided the towns of Wesley Falls and Evansville. On the mountain’s south side, Wesley Falls demonstrates none of the mine’s remains, except for two overgrown paths crisscrossing up to two entrances, boarded up but not hidden well enough to be ignored by partying teens. Heading into downtown, you’d never know that the mine, or its creepy doorways, existed. The Mayberry-esque town boasts generations of family roots, mom-and-pop shops (or, more apt, “shoppes”), and a monolithic church encouraging its congregation to follow in the steps of Jesus and His example of purity. The north side of the mountain, where Evansville falls, continues to be exposed to bouts of noxious gases, open cracks of brimstone in its roads, and residents eager to pack up and leave their dying ghost town. But never mind them. This is a story about Wesley Falls.

"Full of devious, controlling villains, an omnipresent church with deep, sordid ties to its community, and characters who live and breathe their fight for justice, A STEP PAST DARKNESS is a compelling read with strong themes of small-town secrecy, religious control and patriarchal abuses of women."

With its welcome sign declaring it “The BEST place to raise a family,” Wesley Falls is the kind of town that votes against a McDonald’s franchise because it may “deteriorate the town’s character” and always seems to be preserved in amber, a recollection of a better time. But for Jia Kwon and her best friend, Padma Subramaniam, the (ahem) whitewashed town is less utopia than it is hellfire. As practitioners (or at least the daughters of practitioners) of entirely different faiths, Jia and Padma are excluded from the elite “Circle Girls” clique that runs their high school.

Known as Golden Praise church’s purest and most esteemed, the Circle Girls are as pious as they are popular, especially Maddy Wesley, the clique’s queen bee. Jia in particular knows just how ugly Golden Praises’s congregation can be, as Sundays see a rise in complaints about her mother’s gem store, where she also sells crystals, herbal teas and tarot cards. Golden Praise has deemed the establishment --- and Jia and her mother, by proxy --- unChristian. With the town’s councilmen, police, coaches and teachers all members, there is not a lot of support for a single Asian woman and her daughter.

But Jia and Padma are not the only ones left out of Golden Praises’s inner circle. Across town, Kelly Boyle, like any teenage girl, sees popularity as social currency. Although Maddy has been kind to her at times, she’s as hot and cold as a kitchen sink. Lately her treatment of Kelly has been decidedly cold. Already verging on outcast territory due to her friendship with burnout James Curry, Kelly has turned her back on her middle school friends, Jia and Padma, in hopes of securing entry to the inner circle of her school, even as James tries to convince her that Maddy isn’t quite as sweet or Christian as she plays. And then there’s Casey Cooper, the school’s surefire ticket to fame, who already is being scouted by D1 schools, despite his poor academic performance. His coach, a lauded elder at Golden Praise, does what he can to turn attention from his star athlete, but bad grades are about to be the least of his worries.

When these six teens are thrust together for a capstone project that will determine their senior standing (it’s a very Breakfast Club sort of setup), they decide to focus on the mine, its history and its legends. Maddy is visibly put off by the focus, warning them that it’s a bad idea and that the church wouldn’t like it, though she can’t say why. On the night that they meet up to explore the mine during a party, tragedy strikes when six burnouts fall down the mine’s central shaft to their deaths. It’s a freak accident, the kind that always seems to occur when alcohol and teenage risk-taking are combined.

But there’s one problem with the accident story: Jia, Padma, Kelly, James, Maddy and Casey all saw the other teens’ demise…when they were thrown down the shaft by big, goonlike men wearing shearling coats. In the days that follow, as the investigation begins and is quickly silenced, our six main characters vow never to reveal what they saw and to disband their unlikely union to avoid suspicion --- and protect themselves.

Years later, Jia receives a call from the new sheriff, who has maintained a careful friendship with her since she and the other teens left town. He needs her help finding a missing person: Maddy, who, as far as Jia knows, has been completely estranged from Wesley Falls, Golden Praise and her family since that fateful night. So why was Maddy back in town, and why, when Jia finds her body in a sinkhole in the woods, is her manner of death incompatible with the autopsy report?

Despite their decade-old promise, Jia knows that it's time for her and her former friends to come back to Wesley Falls --- not only to discover what really happened to Maddy, but to learn the truth about that night, about Golden Praise’s hold on the town and about its new resurgence. There’s also one big, haunting mystery plaguing her. On her return to town, she sees Pastor Jim Preiss holding service at Golden Praise, still as beautifully and expensively maintained as it was back then. His presence is creepy enough on its own, but it’s also impossible. After all, Jia watched him die once.

Vera Kurian has a background in psychology, and just as she did in NEVER SAW ME COMING, she gets right into her characters’ (and readers’!) heads in A STEP PAST DARKNESS. With its enticing premise and promise of dual mysteries and timelines, this new book is easy to pick up, but it’s the characters that will keep you reading. Each of the six teens (and later adults) is dealing with a deeply complicated personal issue --- racism, queerness, purity and abuse, to name a few --- and Kurian makes great use of her dual timelines to explore the effects and ramifications of their problems.

With these strong foundations propping up the already enticing setting (who doesn’t love the idea of exploring an old mine in a picture-perfect town with something to hide?), her mysteries --- both Maddy’s death and the teens’ last night as normal citizens --- are able to grow and expand on their own terms, with Kurian delivering eerie twists, shocking turns and heart-palpitating scares along the way. At nearly 500 pages, this one is a bit slower to deliver than NEVER SAW ME COMING, and readers will really need to commit to her story. But once it picks up, there’s no letting go.

Full of devious, controlling villains, an omnipresent church with deep, sordid ties to its community, and characters who live and breathe their fight for justice, A STEP PAST DARKNESS is a compelling read with strong themes of small-town secrecy, religious control and patriarchal abuses of women.