Risa Benson has done her best to move on in the 11 years since her husband vanished and her best friend was brutally murdered. Now married to Alan, an aspiring politician, she spends her time caring for him and her teenaged son, Kevin, as well as running her restaurant known as The Kitchen. Life is pretty good and normal for a small town. Kevin is the star football player for his school and it looks as if Alan is going to win his election. Yes, things are going along well.

Suddenly, all of that changes.

Risa's ex-husband, Sean, has spent the last 11 years in a drunken stupor barely knowing who he is most of the time. A near fatal accident changes everything as he finally starts getting the treatment and help he needs to become whole again. As his alcoholism comes under control, his memory starts to come back in bits and pieces. There are many things that Sean's forgotten through the years, but the one thing that keeps coming to him is the horrific vision of Carol Sleazak's butchered body and himself holding the machete that did the damage.

Sean knows that he's never going to get any peace in his life until he figures out if he was actually the person that killed Carol so many years ago. If he is, then he must speak up because another man has been in prison for the murder all this time, and Sean must make things right. So he boards a bus from the city and returns to the little town of Braden.

Never dreaming she would ever see Sean again, Risa has had him declared legally dead at the insistence of Alan. Now, he's suddenly reappeared in town claiming that he must have been the one that killed Carol and he wants to make things right by turning himself in. Risa starts to realize just how much she missed Sean, and now that he's more like the man she married, she wants to protect him and help him find the truth.

Alan wants nothing more than to get Sean out of town and out of their lives. Risa starts to see him as self-serving, only caring about himself and his political campaign. But there's something else more sinister lurking underneath and Risa is determined to find out what it is.

This is very absorbing novel, although it really kicks into high gear about halfway through. Once I hit the halfway mark, I literally carried this book with me everywhere I went because I just had to find out what happened next. The story has plenty of twists and turns and you won't know the truth until the last few pages when it all comes out. DARKNESS ALL AROUND is a perfect vacation/beach book!