(typewriter squeaking) (upbeat music) - [Paula] Hi, I'm Paula McClain.

And this is "When The Stars Go Dark," an atmospheric emotional literary thriller about a missing persons detective in 1990s, California, and the case she will never forget.

- It is haunting and lyrical and beautiful, and it is a deeply moving story, but it is also a meticulously plotted thriller.

- Anna is a missing persons detective.

When we meet her, she is in San Francisco and there's been a terrible tragedy in her personal life that we don't really know anything about, except that it sends her sort of to hurdling over the edge of a cliff.

And she doesn't know what else to do except to go home.

In her mind, home can only be Mendocino.

So she goes there intending to heal.

And instead, almost the first thing that happens is she learns a local girl has vanished into thin air and basically against her good sense, she becomes wrapped up in this case.

I decided to set the book in the 1990s just to avoid cell phones and the internet, and I wanted it to be pre-DNA testing.

So there had to be more on the ground kind of interviews and a deeper kind of process that led her to deep conversations.

We start to see how everything that she's experienced in her life up until that moment has actually led her to this very particular moment to finding, or at least trying to find this young woman.

- [Ellison] For more of my conversation with Paula McClain, please visit a wordonwords.org.

And thank you for watching A Word On Words.

I'm J.T.

Ellison, keep reading.

- [Paula] I always wrote as a kid, it was how I expressed what I couldn't say.

It's how I spoke back to my experience where there was no room to do that in the world.

It's how I mourned.

And it's how I learned to hope.

I didn't know as a kid kind of hiding away in libraries, right?

Afraid of my actual life that I was building a writer.