It’s a shame Unspeakable has already been used for the title of a book by Sandra Brown. It would perfectly fit Hello, Darkness in several ways. The book is unspeakably boring, the characters are unspeakably irritating, and the suspense plot is unspeakably obvious. Charging people $26 for this? That’s the most unspeakable thing of all.

Paris Gibson is a nighttime DJ at a classic rock station in Austin, Texas. On her show she dispenses both music and advice to the lovelorn and, because radio personalities in romances almost always seem to be targeted by stalkers and assorted crazies, this naturally leads to trouble for Paris. One of her regular callers phones in and blames her for telling his girlfriend to break up with him for being too obsessive. He tells Paris that he has kidnapped his girlfriend, will kill her in three days – and that it’s all Paris’s fault.

Paris goes to the police, which leads to an uncomfortable reunion with police psychologist Dean Malloy. They share a tortured past and haven’t had contact for seven years. In order to find the missing girl, they will have to work together, especially once Dean learns his teenage son may be connected to the case.

Meanwhile Brown introduces several other characters whose stories filter in and out of the main one. The apparent point of these secondary characters is to keep the mystery obscured, even though it is way too obvious which of them are red herrings and which is the real villain.

Setting aside how plodding and predictable the story is, the book has a much larger problem: I hated every single one of these people. Paris is a wooden martyr, and this was a rare instance where a character who felt guilty earned no sympathy from me. When it became clear, long before Brown bothers to reveal it, what the source of Paris and Dean’s torment is, I couldn’t help thinking that she deserved to feel guilty. That may not have been the case had Paris been a compelling, well-developed character. She’s not. She has no personality. She’s just a ceaselessly morose bore.

Dean has a girlfriend named Liz who he’s been seeing for two years. The woman relocated to Austin to be with him (albeit without asking him). He doesn’t love her and she seems to irritate him, yet he refuses to be honest enough to break up with her. Instead, knowing that she’s taking the relationship much more seriously than he is, knowing that he has no particular interest in marrying her, he continues to sleep with her and drag things out. What a great guy. Though a blind person could see the reason for Paris and Dean’s guilt and estrangement, Brown drags it out for most of the book, dribbling it out in flashbacks. When they finally confront it, the author has the audacity to try to throw guilt back on the wronged party to make her hero and heroine look less bad. It’s one of many moments I wanted to throw the book down in disgust. At least she has this rationalization come from Dean, who she already established as a jerk.

The rest of the cast is filled out with assorted pervs and whiners. There’s a sex-addicted dentist who was convicted of child molestation for groping a young female patient and seems to be up to his old tricks. There’s his wife, who knows what he’s up to and instead of getting her kids away from him like anyone with a brain would do, stays with him and contents herself with whining and nagging. There’s Dean’s screwed-up teenaged son, who hates him for reasons that are revealed to be too typical. There’s a bullying cop with his own taste for underage sex. There’s the slutty, drunken victim who’s all for getting laid any which way she can until she finds herself in a situation out of her control. There’s her parents, an arrogant judge and his annoyingly clueless wife. There’s Paris’s sexually dysfunctional co-worker at the radio station, complete with promiscuous parents and an uncle who owns the station and also frequents prostitutes. There’s a station janitor with his own sexual frustrations and a screeching harpy of a white trash mother.

Sounds like a fun group, doesn’t it? Unpleasant characters are one thing if the story is interesting. This one is not. Instead of constructing a decent mystery, Brown uses the typical tricks of poor mystery writers. Anyone who’s read enough mysteries should be able to figure out which characters are red herrings and who the killer must be based on the amount and type of attention she pays to each of them. Most of these characters are revealed to be connected to each other in ridiculously convoluted ways that serve no purpose in the story other than to keep everyone looking suspicious. Isn’t it convenient that apparently half the population of Houston decided to move to Austin with Paris? The story plods along to its non-surprise ending. It’s slow. It’s boring. And there’s nothing about it that makes spending 400 pages with these irritating characters worthwhile.

Hello, Darkness fails in nearly every way. Was the suspense complex and intriguing? No. Were the characters likeable or sympathetic enough for me to overlook the weak storyline? No. Most importantly, did I care one bit whether any one of them lived or died? No, no, no, no, no. One last question: is the book worth your money? The answer, most definitely, is no.