Hello, darkness

Hello, Darkness is a novel by the American writer Sandra Brown, published in 2003 and set in Austin, Texas.

Paris has moved to the city and built a solitary life around a job that lets her talk to people without meeting them, and the caller turns that into a trap: he knows enough about her habits to choose the moment. The police put a psychologist on the case with her, and the two of them work through the calls and the records while the hours run down. Brown writes the pursuit with the attacker's voice inside it, and the tension comes from the fact that the calls are addressed to Paris personally and that she cannot stop answering the telephone. The plot turns on a connection to an earlier crime and on what the people involved have been keeping from one another.

It is one of the author's long series of suspense novels, and it followed several set in Texas and Louisiana; the plot depends on how much of a stranger the caller turns out to be.