A man’s family can be his cornerstone, or it can be the source of his deepest pain. Without a doubt, family is the one thing everyone always has to hold on to, unless someone takes it away.

In “Four Corners of Night,” Craig Holden explores what can happen to a man whose world is shattered when his daughter is kidnapped in the broad daylight of her own street.

As a detective, the physically-huge Bank Arbaugh sees a lot on the streets he patrols. But nothing prepares him for when the impossible happens to his own family. When his 9-year-old stepdaughter, Jamie, is snatched, it takes all of Bank’s and partner Mack’s strength to keep Bank from falling apart.

The partners are bonded by more than just the police force — they share a past which dates back to grade school. Bank has always been Mack’s protector and comforter, but the roles are switched when Jamie never returns home. Both of the mens’ marriages fall apart, but Mack rediscovers love while Bank lives a life without a wife and family.

Years later, young Tamara Shipley is taken from her neighborhood and her bicycle is found abandoned on the street. Bank frantically tries to solve the case, grasping any lead he can find, all the while reliving his own past terrors. Of Bank’s obsession with the past, Mack says, “We all, I suppose, reenact our lives over and over again, each moment an echo, a mimicking of some other. And the sums of these moments, the hours and months, are echoes as well, of patterns we set before we could ever have understood such things.”

Soon, Jamie and Tamara’s cases start to connect in ways that cannot be ignored or passed off as coincidence. Chilling evidence about what happened to the two girls starts to surface, and Mack must question how much Bank really knows about the cases, and how much he is choosing to reveal.

Holden, best-selling author of “The River Sorrow” and “The Last Sanctuary,” connects his characters to readers and gives his story a realistic feel. The plot does not begin with the kidnapping of Jamie and then move into Tamara’s kidnapping, but instead flashes back and forth.

By not writing in chronological order, Holden connects the two cases in obvious ways, and readers are left longing for one side of the story while still immersed in the other.

Holden doesn’t bring “Four Corners of Night” to one gasp-worthy climax, but several, leaving the reader in awe. Seemingly small and irrelevant details, barely skimmed over, become items frantically searched for in past pages, and clues that once seemed to matter are deemed unimportant in the wake of newfound evidence.

Reading Holden’s work is like solving a mystery step by step, all the while re-evaluating thoughts and re-tracing steps. But the moral of this story never falters. Family is the one constant that can make a person — or break them.

3 Stars

Rating based on a 5 Star scale