Review: The Darkness Within

The Darkness Within by Lisa Stone
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Shane is a disturbed young individual. He manipulates his girlfriend Rosie in lots of ways and is violent towards her. Then Shane takes her car one night and is involved in an accident which proves to be fatal. Rosie is relieved and begins to rebuild her life.

Enter Jacob Wilson, who is critically ill. A donor heart is found for Jacob and he undergoes a transplant operation. But then things start to go downhill. The post op regime of medication and hospital check ups is hard and Jacob becomes a changed person. He’s rude and difficult with his parents, Elizabeth and Andrew. Then he crosses paths with Rosie.

Meanwhile his Mother is becoming convinced the changes are the result of his transplant due to cellular memory* and she starts to try and track down his donor.

Interesting premise but I felt it was taking things a step too far to have Rosie as the girlfriend of both Shane and Jacob. I’m sure after such a bad experience with Shane she would have been more wary of going down the same road. There was also a lot of profanity in the book and crude descriptions of sex which were appropriate for the narrative but might not be to everyone’s taste. I also found Jacob’s parents (Elizabeth and Andrew) quite weak characters. They didn’t seem to tackle the problems their son was having, especially Andrew, and I’m not sure a Vicar’s wife would be able to live with the knowledge she had about Jacob’s actions.

*It’s claimed that cells retain memories that are then transplanted with the organ and can lead to changes in the recipient. I checked this out to see if the author had based this on truth or not and, although it is thought to be possible, only limited studies have been done. However some evidence does seem to support the claim. I think if it became a proven thing it might cause issues within the transplant process.


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