I really enjoyed the first book in Long’s A.L. McKittridge series, Ten Days Gone , it is an exciting book with a bit of romance and drama thrown in to make it interesting. I was excited to find that the next installment was available for review and totally inhaled it.
I voluntarily reviewed a complimentary copy of this book. All opinions are my own. This post contains affiliate links, see disclosures for more detail.
About the Book:
Baywood police department detective A.L. McKittridge is no stranger to tough cases, but when five-year-old Emma Whitman disappears from her day care, there isn’t a single shred of evidence to go on. Neither the grandmother who dropped her off, nor the teacher whose care she was supposed to be in, can account for the missing child. There are no witnesses. No trace of where she might have gone. There’s only one thing A.L. and his partner, Rena Morgan, are sure of—somebody is lying.
With the clock ticking, A.L. and Rena are under extreme pressure as they discover their instincts are correct: all is not as it seems. The Whitmans are a family with many secrets, and A.L. and Rena will have to race to untangle a growing web of lies if they’re going to find the thread that leads them to Emma…before it’s too late.
My Thoughts:
I gave this book 4 stars
I love missing people stories, and this one was no exception. It reminded me so much of the Kyron Horman case at the beginning–grandmother said she dropped the child off at daycare and left the child with a teacher, when the dad goes to pick up the child at the end of the day, the daycare says she was never there.
Long’s second police procedural in this series is excellent. There’s a deliberate unfolding of the story through interviews and investigation that makes the reader feel a part of the action. My curiosity about what happened to the child was piqued throughout and I stayed up late into the night to discover the identity of the culprit and the “why” behind it all and I was not disappointed.
I also like that there’s just enough revealed of the personal lives of Rena and A.L., yet it doesn’t overpower the main mystery. There’s a tendency for authors to bog the story down with personal details in an attempt to give the characters depth, but for me it gets annoying when the balance is off. I like the focus on the primary story with small amounts of detail. You don’t need to read the series in order necessarily, because each has a self-contained mystery, but you will miss out on that background character development and be a little lost when events from the previous book, Ten Days Gone, are referenced.
Overall this is a satisfying story for mystery and police procedural fans.
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