Lights Out (Into Darkness, Book 1), by Navessa Allen

The setup is BookTok catnip and it knows it. Aly is a trauma nurse whose coping mechanism involves following masked men online, which is specific enough to be funny and grounded enough to make sense once you understand what her shifts actually look like. Josh is a cybersecurity expert whose father happens to be an infamous serial killer, which the book uses not as a trauma dump but as a recurring source of dark humor about nature versus nurture. He is also extremely online in a way that feels completely plausible. The banter between these two, once they are actually in contact, is the best part of the book. It is fast, it is unhinged, and it never drags.

Fred the cat deserves a separate mention. He is technically a supporting character. He behaves like the protagonist. Several readers have noted he steals the show and they are not wrong. His scenes with Josh are among the funniest in the book, which is saying something given the competition.

The thriller layer that comes in during the second half changes the register enough to matter. It is not a full pivot into suspense, but it raises the stakes at a point where a lesser book would have started coasting. Josh going from creepy admirer to actual protector is handled without the book pretending he was a good person all along. That honesty is what keeps the dynamic from feeling cheap.

Elena Wolfe and Jacob Morgan narrate in duet, each voicing their own POV chapters, and they also interact directly when both characters appear in the same scene. Two distinct voices in the same chapter, playing off each other in real time, is not something every audiobook production bothers to do, and the difference is immediately noticeable. Morgan in particular brings a warmth to Josh that stops the character from reading as purely sinister. Wolfe keeps Aly sharp throughout. The production was published by Zando Penguin Audio and the recording quality is clean and consistent across the full 13 hours and 36 minutes.