My Child Is Missing by Lisa Regan

 

The plot:  Two go into the woods, but only one comes out. That's the legend of The Woodsman. And it's spreading across Pennsylvania--scaring elementary-age children, challenging the teenagers. Detective Josie Quinn knows it's just a story, but when two sister go missing, and only the younger girl is found, she also knows something sinister is going on. The investigation into Kayleigh's disappearance is hard enough, but Josie's not sleeping because of some recent traumatic events, and then she learns about two other murders linked to the story of The Woodsman... and she starts to wonder if they have a serial killer on their hands.

My thoughts:  This is the eighteenth Josie Quinn book, and another excellent mystery in this addictive series. Josie and her partner, Noah Fraley, are so good together. I've liked seeing how their relationship has developed and grown over the course of these mysteries. And I found this particular mystery nicely twisty and unexpected. I've been reading this series in order, which I recommend, because Josie's past is fairly complicated. But all the books in this series aren't long and they read fast. 

My rating:  ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Happy Reading!

Other Josie Quinn mysteries I've reviewed:

Vanishing Girls (#1)

The Girl With No Name (#2)

Her Mother's Grave (#3)

Her Silent Cry (#6)

Cold Heart Creek (#7)

The Drowning Girls (#13)

Watch Her Disappear (#14)

The Return of Ellie Black by Emiko Jean

 

"I have a hard time not blaming myself for what happened. I wish I didn't. I wish this was not a cautionary tale about what happens to girls who wander off in the dark. Who are made to learn there are bad people everywhere. That the truth is these people are not strangers. They are the men who you sleep with, the men you work with, the men you raise. I wish this wasn't what it means to be female--it is not a matter of if something bad will happen, but when."

Two years. Two weeks. One day. 

That's how long Ellie Black has been missing when she stumbles from the Captiol State Forest near Olympia, Washington. She's thin, bruised, clearly traumatized, and wearing a sweatshirt spattered with someone else's blood. Ellie's disappearance was Chelsey Calhoun's first case as a detective. Now she's hoping to find Ellie's abductor and arrest him. Only Ellie won't answer any of her questions, and it's clear she's keeping secrets. When Chelsey learns that the blood on Ellie's sweatshirt is from another girl who went missing before Ellie, Chelsey fears there are more missing girls out there still being held by the man or men who took Ellie. And she's determined to find them. 

"Ever since Ellie Black's disappearance, Chelsey has volunteered for any case involving violence against women. She always has plenty of work to do. All those beaten, all those bruised, all those maimed women are welcomed on Chelsey's shores. It is a type of atonement, Chelsey understands. She could not save (her sister) Lydia. She could not solve Ellie's case. ... A lump rises in Chelsey's throat, and she gulps it back. She won't allow the tears to come. All these girls. These bright, bold, beautiful girls. All that potential wasted. All those possibilities snuffed out. What could have been. The question stretches to infinity. She pulls one of Lydia's Beatrix Potter rabbits from the bed and screams into it with a shimmery, impotent rage."

This mystery is both page-turning and haunting. It alternates between Ellie's and Chelsey's POVs. I could understand and sympathize with Chelsey's intense determination to learn the truth about what happened to Ellie, and to keep it from happening to any other girls. And I liked the way Ellie's story unfolded bit by bit over the course of the novel. It kept me guessing about what secrets she was hiding. And there's a good, very unexpected twist, at the end. This is a very compelling thriller, as well as a sad commentary on the bad things that can happen to young girls in our society.  ⭐⭐⭐⭐

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The Taken Ones by Jess Lourey

 

JULY 1980:  Three girls enter the Minnesota woods at the end of their street to go swimming in the creek one summer afternoon. Only one girl comes back out, so traumatized she can't remember what happened to her two friends. Was it the Bendy Man who took them? Or someone else?

SUMMER 2022:  When the body of a woman who was buried alive is found, the small gold heart found with her connects her to the Taken Ones. Minnesota's BCA brings in cold case detective Evangeline "Van" Reed and forensic scientist Harry Steinbeck to investigate. And Van is determined to figure out what happened to those two missing girls, no matter how many people she angers in the process. 

My thoughts:  I really loved Jess Lourey's book The Quarry Girls, and this one is equally good. But I don't know how to talk about it, because so much of this story just needs to unfold on its own. Especially with Van, her past, and all her secrets. She's a complicated character, with flaws and vulnerabilities, and a special talent that helps her know things she shouldn't. I liked her. And Harry is great, too. I think his secrets might come out in the next book. Another thing I really liked is Lourey's writing; she has a gift for adding poetic touches to her prose. If you like character-driven mysteries with atmosphere and suspense, give this one a try.

My rating:  ⭐⭐⭐⭐

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A classic mystery...

 

Title & Author:  Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay

Setting:  1900. Appleyard College, a private boarding school for young ladies in Australia. 

First line:  "Everyone agreed that the day was just right for the picnic to Hanging Rock--a shimmering summer morning warm and still, with cicadas shrilling all through breakfast from the loquat trees outside the dining-room windows and bees murmuring above the pansies bordering the drive.

The plot:  The book starts out with a pleasant outing: twenty girls and two teachers having a picnic lunch at Hanging Rock. Then four of the girls take an innocent walk up to the monolith. Only one of them comes back, hysterical. The others are nowhere to be found. The mystery of what happened to those three girls, and the repercussions of their strange disappearance and how it affects those left behind, take up the rest of this novel.

My thoughts:  This is not a fast page-turning thriller. The narrative is slow, almost methodical, with more description than dialogue. But I thought it was interesting, especially seeing the impact this one tragic incident has on those at Appleyard College. Although it's not the girls who are at the center of this novel. (A fact I found a little disappointing.) I like stories set in boarding schools, but there's no immediacy in this one, and no real sense of daily life. The school is mostly in the background.

There were three characters I liked: Michael Fitzhubert and Albert Crundall, two young men who help search for the girls, and Mademoiselle de Poitiers, the young French teacher at Appleyard. But I never felt a deep connection with any of them. There's an almost surreal quality to this novel. And the mystery is left unsolved at the end. Although I actually liked that about the novel. The truth probably would have been a letdown. I prefer the not-knowing. All in all, I'd give this one 3 stars. 

This book was published in 1967, and counts as my Mystery/Detective/Crime Classic for Karen's Back to the Classics Challenge. 

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Vanishing Girls by Lisa Regan

Detective Josie Quinn's life is a complete mess:  she's been suspended from the police force for using excessive force, her husband, who's also on Denton's police force, cheated on her but won't sign their divorce papers, her new boyfriend wants to marry her, a TV reporter won't stop hounding her, and she doesn't know what to do with all the free time she's got on her hands.

What she really wants to do is help find Isabelle Coleman, a teen who's gone missing. When another girl who's been missing for over a year unexpectedly turns up, Josie thinks the two cases are connected. But she's been forbidden from investigating either one. Only it's not in her nature to just stand by and watch, even if getting involved means jeopardizing her career. Or even her life. Because there's something going on in Denton, something dark and dangerous.

My thoughts:
There's a lot to like about this one: a well-developed, complicated main character, good pacing, unexpected twists and turns, a chilling mystery, and a suspenseful ending. This is the first book in Regan's Detective Josie Quinn mystery series, and it's an excellent read. I really enjoyed it. And I'm looking forward to reading the other books that follow. Here's hoping they're all as good as this one.

Happy Reading!

The Last Time I Lied by Riley Sager

"It'll be a summer you'll remember for the rest of your life."

Emma. Vivian. Natalie. Allison. They're the four girls in Dogwood cabin. Emma, who's the youngest at 13, has never been to summer camp before, but Vivian takes her under her wing. Their favorite game? Two truths and a lie. Then one night in July, Vivian, Natalie and Allison sneak out in the middle of the night and never come back. The police search the woods and the lake, but the three girls are never found. 

Fifteen years later, Camp Nightingale is reopening. The owners ask Emma to come back to teach art. She's a famous painter now...a painter who's suffering from a severe case of artist's block. At first, she doesn't want to go. But then she thinks she might be able to figure out what happened to Vivian and the others. Find some closure. Move on with her life. But being back at Camp Nightingale is harder than she expected, bringing back memories she'd rather forget. And when three more girls go missing, Emma becomes the prime suspect.

I really liked this book:  the summer camp setting, the flashbacks of Emma's first summer at Camp Nightingale, her ghostly visions of Vivian, the psychological suspense as everyone else around her begins to doubt her sanity, the mystery behind Vivian's, Natalie's, and Allison's disappearance, and the secret history of Camp Nightingale itself. It's all great!

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Foxglove Summer

"The news cycle reset at the top of the hour and I learned that the tiny village of Rushpool in sleepy rural Herefordshire was the center of a massive police search operation for two eleven-year-old girls, best friends, Nicole Lacey and Hannah Marstowe, who had been missing for over forty-eight hours. Neighbors were said to be shocked and time was running out."

SUMMARY:  Peter Grant, police constable and apprentice wizard, is sent to Rushpool from London to see if there's a magical connection to these disappearances. What he finds is traces of vestigia and a few other clues that point him toward the fae. It's not what he was hoping for, because the land of the fae is tricky to navigate. Luckily, his river goddess girlfriend comes to help him try to find the girls and bring them back.

Foxglove Summer by Ben Aaronovitch is a fun investigative mystery, although I was expecting there to be a lot more magic than there was. Still, it does have an invisible unicorn in it. And Peter is a great character. I liked his girlfriend, Beverley Brook, too. I just wish I'd read the previous four books in this series before this one so I understood the many references to past characters better. But the mystery itself needed no extra clarification. (Although it could have moved at a slightly faster pace and had a touch more suspense in it.) Still, I'll definitely be reading the other books in this series. In order this time!

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The Silent Girls by Eric Rickstad

Who:

• Mandy Wilks, sixteen and missing
• Frank Rath, current PI and former police detective with a teen-age daughter of his own.
• Sonja Test, Canaan's "forensics team-of-one", mother & marathoner
• Harland Grout, detective on the Canaan police force
• Ned Preacher, the man who murdered Rath's sister and who's up for parole...and out for revenge

Where:  Rural Vermont

What:  Girls are going missing without a trace; beautiful Mandy Wilks is just the latest victim. And no one knows why...or who is taking them. But Rath is determined to find a connection and figure out the truth, while keeping his own daughter, Rachel, safe.

"Wherever there were girls, some would go missing, plucked like errant threads from the fabric of  everyday life and cast into a lurid nightmare of someone else's making. Movies created suspense out of a 'forty-eight-hour window' cops had to find a girl alive, as if kidnapped girls had a 'kill-by" date. The colder reality remained:  A girl gone missing against her will, nine times out of ten, was dead within three hours."

The Verdict:  I didn't love this book, but I did like it enough to want to read the sequel, and not just because of the cliffhanger ending in this one. Rath is a flawed, but dogged detective; I liked him more as the novel went on, but I think Sonja was my favorite character. I like the way she and Rath work together. Too bad she wasn't in this book more. The mystery surrounding Mandy's and the other girls' disappearances was good:  interesting and intense, but not necessarily mind-blowing. I'm hoping the next one, The Name of Dead Girls, is better. That's why I'm off to put it on hold.

Happy Reading!

More bookish suspense...

Title:  The Girl Who Was Taken by Charlie Donlea
First line:  Darkness had forever been part of her life.
Similar read:  The Never List by Koethi Zan

The Plot:  Two girls go missing, both abducted in the summer of 2016:  Nicole Cutty and Megan McDonald. Only Megan comes back.  One year later, they still don't know where Nicole is. Nicole's older sister, Livia, is studying forensic pathology in the hopes of one day figuring out what happened to her sister. But then the body of the man her sister had been dating that last summer shows up in Livia's morgue. It appears he was murdered around the same time her sister went missing. So what happened to him? And what does Megan know that she's not telling? And, most importantly, where is Nicole? Livia can't help digging for  the truth.


The Verdict:  This mystery unfolds in two ways:  through Livia's and Megan's POVs and their actions in the present, and through Nicole's own story in the weeks leading up to her abduction. I don't always love narratives that alternate between the past and the present, but it works here. Each piece of Nicole's story added to the mystery of her disappearance and kept the suspense building which was a nice contrast to Livia's more methodical forensic side of the investigation. And the more I read, the more intense the mystery got. These two sisters could not be more different. Then there's Megan who keeps trying to remember details from her abduction; as she gets closer and closer to the truth the tension really begins to mount. Kudos to Charlie Donlea. The Girl Who Was Taken is an engrossing mystery with several good twists and turns that really kept me guessing. I liked it a lot.

Happy Reading!

Another serendipitous find from the M shelf...

Title:  Arrowood
Author:   Laura McHugh

Then:  "My little sisters were neither alive nor dead, hovering somewhere in between, in the hazy purgatory of the missing. I had been the sole witness to their kidnapping when I was eight years old, and I had spent my childhood wondering  if the man who took them might come back for me. He was never arrested, and no bodies were ever found."

Now:  Leaving her master's thesis unfinished, Arden Arrowood returns to her family's ancestral home, Arrowood, in Keokuk, Iowa, to the very house from which her twin sisters disappeared seventeen years ago. The house itself feels the same, and Ben Ferris, her first love, still lives nearby, but so many other things have changed. Even her memories of that fateful September afternoon when Violet and Tabitha went missing don't feel so reliable any more. And when Josh Kyle shows up investigating the mystery of her sisters' disappearance for a book he's writing, Arden can't help wondering where the truth actually lies. Only not everyone in Keokuk wants her digging up those long-buried secrets from the past.

My thoughts:  What a great read! I loved McHugh's words and imagery, and the way she builds such quiet suspense all the way through to the end of the book. And her characters are very well-written:  Ben and Josh are likeable, Heaney, the care-taker, is a little creepy, Arden's mother is so passive and superficial it made me want to slap her, and Arden herself, who hasn't been able to move forward or find her own happiness because of what happened to her sisters and her own sense of guilt over it, felt very authentic and real. I liked her a lot. I would definitely recommend this mystery to anyone who enjoys a good story.

Happy Reading!

From the R Shelf...

Author:  Michael Robotham

Title:  Say You're Sorry

How it begins:  "My name is Piper Hadley and I went missing on the last Saturday of the summer holidays three years ago. I didn't disappear completely and I didn't run away, which is what a lot of people thought ... I didn't disappear alone. My best friend Tash was with me. I wish she were here now.

The main players:  The two missing girls, Piper Hadley and Natasha McBain; clinical psychologist Joe O'Loughlin who's been asked by the Oxford police to consult on a related case; ex-cop Vincent Ruiz who helps Joe with his investigation; and the man who took the girls, a man they call George.

My thoughts:  Talk about a serendipitous find from the R shelf! I loved this book. It's suspenseful; it's got memorable characters; it's very well-written; and it kept me guessing until the very end, which every good mystery should. The chapters alternate between Piper and Joe as Robotham skillfully weaves together the past and the present. It was in the hopes of stumbling upon amazing novels like Say You're Sorry and even more amazing authors like Michael Robotham that made me start Reading the Alphabet in the first place. I can't wait to read Robotham's other psychological thrillers. I understand Joe O'Loughlin is the main recurring character, which makes me glad because I like him. In fact, I liked everything about this book.

Happy Reading!

Similar reads:

The Edge of Normal by Carla Norton

The Whisperer by Donato Carrisi

In the Woods by Tana French

Gone Missing

"My name is Kate Burkholder and I've been the police chief of Painters Mill for about three years now. I was born here to Amish parents in a one-hundred-old farmhouse set on sixty acres of northeastern Ohio's rich, glaciated soil. I grew up Plain. Up until the age of fourteen, I was a typical Amish girl--innocent, God-loving, content in the way most Amish children are ... All of that changed on a postcard-perfect summer day when fate introduced me to the dark side of human nature. I learned at a formative age that even on perfect, sunny days, bad things happen."

 In this Linda Castillo mystery, Kate Burkholder has been asked by State Agent John Tomasetti to consult on a case involving three missing Amish teenage girls. They come from different communities in Ohio; they didn't know one another; and they went missing months apart. But Kate and Tomasetti think their disappearances might be related. Then one of the girls turns up dead, and a fourth girl goes missing--a girl that Kate knows personally.

This is a good mystery. But it's the Amish setting I like best: their rules and restrictions, family values and faith, and the way they choose to not be a part of the modern world. Because she was raised Amish, Kate understands them; but because she chose to leave their community when she was eighteen, she's no longer welcome among them, which makes her a nicely complicated character. In her job as police chief, she tries to bridge the gap between the Amish and the English, which isn't easy.  And her growing relationship with Agent Tomasetti is another fun complication. It's all these layers and complications that make this mystery series so good.

Happy Reading!