The dark web, which often comes up in today's TV thrillers, is making its mark in mystery fiction, too, as a new digital maze in which detectives must seek encryption-masked villains. For the uninitiated, dark web content exists on darknets that use the Internet but require specific software, configurations or authorizations to access. The identities and locations of darknet users stay anonymous and cannot be tracked due to a layered encryption system, which makes the dark web naturally attractive to black marketers, drug sellers, hackers, pedophiles and terrorists. Here are four recent well-reviewed mysteries that involve dark web sleuthing. In 2019's This is Gomorrah by Tom Chatfield, hacker Azi Bello is recruited by a mysterious espionage unit to take on Gomorrah, an exclusive dark web marketplace where Islamic terrorists have left a clue to their next deadly move. The Dark Web Murders by Brian O'Hare also arrived this year as an entry in the Inspector Sheehan series, pitting Sheehan and his team against a fiendishly clever serial killer who posts luridly about his kills on dark web blogs, murdering with seeming impunity. Meanwhile, a 2017 techno-thriller set in Portland, The Dark Net by Benjamin Percy, posits that the dark web also hosts an ancient evil threatening to spread virally into the real world unless it can be stopped by members of a ragtag crew: 12-year-old blind girl with a high-tech visual prosthetic, a technophobic journalist, a one-time child evangelist with a basement full of weapons, and a hacker who styles himself as a cyber warrior. In the 2015 mystery Dark Web by T.J. Brearton, the death of an online-gaming teen launches Detective John Swift on a quest to untangle a web of virtual and real crimes to solve a complex mystery. Those still skimming the Internet surface via Google and Facebook may want to first dive into the darker reaches with Jamie Bartlett's nonfiction The Dark Net.
