I don't think the title has anything to do with the story.
Dates read: May 3 - May 6
Genre(s): mystery, suspense, thriller
Rating: 3 stars (liked it)
This is a better start to this series than Watching is to the Making of Riley Paige series, which is why I'm only giving it one more star. Though this one has better action, suspense, twists, and overall scenes, there are still a few problems.
The characters are typical and one-dimensional. The protagonist is your archetypal female lone wolf who is looked down on by her male superiors and has a daughter who was abducted five years prior to this abduction, so of course, she is frankly too close to the current case. Her partner is the typical tough-but-soft-like-a-huggable-bear guy with huge stature and muscles. There was a lot of noticeable sexual tension written between them, of course. The senator father of the abducted girl predictably cares more about his own privacy and the potential the police work has on creating a scandal (that will surely ruin his career) than he does about getting his daughter back. And finally, you have the mother who eventually stands up to her husband, demanding that he care about their daughter more than his political position for once. That's just too many tropes in one story!
There are other, more minor issues that bugged me as well. Repetition. Repetition. Again, with this author, there were several instances in which I thought, "I have already read this," or I noticed that something was repeated not even a paragraph later. Examples: Keri realized something and then a sentence later, she "now realized" it. I was also explicitly told too many times that Detective Edgerton was the tech guy on the force. You only need to tell us once. I know these are minor, but they are incredibly annoying to deal with as a reader.
Issues aside, I liked this book for the suspense, clues, and the unpredictability of who the abductor was. Unlike in the last book I reviewed by this author, I didn't know who took the girl or why until somewhere in the last 20% of the novel. The captor's old farm with a scary silo effectively freaked me out, but I wish I had gotten even more description of it! Silos are truly scary on their own!
The characters are typical and one-dimensional. The protagonist is your archetypal female lone wolf who is looked down on by her male superiors and has a daughter who was abducted five years prior to this abduction, so of course, she is frankly too close to the current case. Her partner is the typical tough-but-soft-like-a-huggable-bear guy with huge stature and muscles. There was a lot of noticeable sexual tension written between them, of course. The senator father of the abducted girl predictably cares more about his own privacy and the potential the police work has on creating a scandal (that will surely ruin his career) than he does about getting his daughter back. And finally, you have the mother who eventually stands up to her husband, demanding that he care about their daughter more than his political position for once. That's just too many tropes in one story!
There are other, more minor issues that bugged me as well. Repetition. Repetition. Again, with this author, there were several instances in which I thought, "I have already read this," or I noticed that something was repeated not even a paragraph later. Examples: Keri realized something and then a sentence later, she "now realized" it. I was also explicitly told too many times that Detective Edgerton was the tech guy on the force. You only need to tell us once. I know these are minor, but they are incredibly annoying to deal with as a reader.
Issues aside, I liked this book for the suspense, clues, and the unpredictability of who the abductor was. Unlike in the last book I reviewed by this author, I didn't know who took the girl or why until somewhere in the last 20% of the novel. The captor's old farm with a scary silo effectively freaked me out, but I wish I had gotten even more description of it! Silos are truly scary on their own!