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The previous book ended with a cliffhanger: Doctor Logan and Detective Riley intruded on and contaminated a crime scene and found a huge pool of not-yet-congealed blood with a child’s shoe in it in an otherwise empty cabin.

Tedious B Plot

Let’s get the B plot out of the way. The B plot is somebody is killing criminals who got away with it and sending letters to Riley with obscure clues about sites that the reader cannot possibly guess but she gets in about ten seconds. She then goes out to the indicated site and finds a dismembered body buried or bricked up or whatever, with plenty of signs so she won’t miss it.

Eventually a CCTV shows a car with a distinctive decal at one of the dump sites. This car was linked to unsolved crimes decades before. Riley goes out to talk to the owner, who is old, on oxygen, and obviously not the vigilante killing and chopping up criminals. He says he has a son who is a prison guard and a daughter who is an artist. Riley checks into this, and the son quit his job some time ago, while the daughter has never gone to college or held a job or, indeed, interacted with the system in any way.

Riley also finds that when the son was little, he claimed to CPS that his father chopped up his sister and buried her under the patio. Nobody paid any attention. So obviously the son is the vigilante, and he steals and uses his father’s car to dump bodies so as to incriminate his father. Who obviously cannot be the vigilante.

Riley orders the patio torn up, and of course the sister’s dismembered body parts are underneath. Of course.

What a stupid plan. Go to the authorities now to report that you personally witnessed your father murdering, dismembering, and burying your sister. If they won’t act, make a stink with the news. This whole vigilante plan is stupid.

Finding Jamie

Jamie, the daughter-by-rape of Logan’s deceased wife, Marie, had snatched Dani, his seven-year-old daughter, after murdering her nanny, Bonnie. Jamie had a good car, lots of cash, new birth certificates, social security number, and identities for her and Dani. She had planned on going to Portland from Dani’s home in California, but even though she’d had days, maybe as much as a week, to drive away, she was still spotted within an hour’s drive of Dani’s home.

Which is interesting, actually. Who spotted her and called in the sighting? We never find out.

Why didn’t Jamie just drive to Portland and take up her new identity as she planned? We never find that out either.

So, after the cliffhanger, Logan is frozen in horror, understandably since he thinks Jamie has now murdered Dani as well. He doesn’t seem to recognize what I recognize, which is that there is far too much blood for a seven-year-old child. So he’s been sent away and Riley and the FBI are looking for Jamie and Dani in the woods behind the cabin. Pretty soon, they find Jamie with a sprained ankle. She is missing one shoe. Where did she lose a shoe? That was Dani’s shoe in the pool of blood.

Anyway, Jamie won’t talk, so they try to figure out where Dani is. They guess that Jamie murdered somebody, Dani saw the murder and ran away in panic, and Jamie went after her.

Jamie did what?

If Jamie ran after Dani, who removed the body from which all that blood came? This is literally never addressed. The disappearance of the body is not even mentioned until page 249:

Agents were still searching the area, but it wasn’t the same as before. While they hadn’t found Dani, they did find the woman that Jamie had killed in that cabin. There was a crawl space under the cabin, her body was stuffed in there.

So Jamie murdered this woman and Dani saw the murder and ran away in panic. Jamie went outside, walked around the cabin looking for a crawl space, went back inside, picked up the body (no drag marks, you see), carried it outside, stuffed it in the crawl space, and then and only then went to look for the small child that she killed three women to claim.

I wonder why she didn’t also clean up the mess before looking for Dani. I mean, there’s no reason to hide the body at all unless she expects the police to show up. But if the police do show up, that huge pool of blood is the sort of clue that even these cops will likely pick up on.

Actually, I know why she hid the body. As the Critical Drinker says, she did it “so the plot can happen”. If she left the body, then everyone would know perfectly well that Dani wasn’t murdered right there, which might spoil the cliffhanger.

Or, well, I guess maybe somebody else moved the body. One of the many serial killers in the area might have decided to clean up for Jamie. Professional courtesy, as it were.

The Dead Child

As the FBI searches the cabin for Dani, they find a dead child stuffed in a crawl space. This crawl space is inside as opposed to the other crawl space that is outside. This child has been been so viciously beaten that she’s unrecognizable. When Logan sees her he faints, figuring she is in fact Dani.

She isn’t.

Who is she? Who beat her to death and stuffed her in a crawl space? Jamie? Her mother? The woman Jamie killed, if that wasn’t her mother? A passing serial killer?

She isn’t Dani, so who knows? Who cares? No one in this book does.

Serious Editing Error

The FBI agent is talking to Logan about Jamie:

She sighed. “We have spoken to her and her lawyer, who even told her she should cooperate. She refuses. She won’t tell us anything, and we don’t know what else we can do to make her. She’s already facing serious prison time for three murders. I told her we could make her a deal, but she still won’t speak to us. I don’t understand her endgame.”

My brain was frozen. I couldn’t create a thought past the word four. “Four murders. This woman, Bonnie, Everly… who’s the fourth?”

But nobody said the word four. I actually did a search for the word in case I missed it. Nobody said “four”.

I believe the detective was supposed to say “She’s facing serious prison time for three murders, possibly four.” Because the rest of the dialogue is about Jamie possibly having killed Marie in that car accident (hit and run) where Marie wasn’t wearing a seat belt while her ER doctor husband was driving.

Finding Dani

Logan’s neighbors drive over to do a grid search behind the cabin. I remind you that Jamie had days to drive away from an area where she’d committed two murders and a kidnapping, that she had a plan to go to Portland, and that nevertheless, she was still within easy driving distance of the sites of the murders and kidnapping.

Anyway, they don’t find Dani.

Logan goes off questioning neighbors of the murder cabin. One woman randomly says her daughter likes to put Sailor Moon stickers on her shoes. This is what Dani does, so Logan invites himself into her home to talk. While she fixes tea, he notices Dani’s backpack sitting right out in the open.

Logan excuses himself to use the facilities and notices a door with a padlock on it. This is strange, but I’ll get back to that. He demands that she open the padlock and she attacks him with a knife. After being stabbed several times in painful but not incapacitating places, he subdues her, breaks the padlock, and finds Dani drugged inside.

So, uh, why put a padlock on the door when Dani is so heavily drugged that she doesn’t even twitch when Logan and the woman are fighting right outside the door, or when she’s taken to the ambulance, or when she’s admitted to the hospital? The padlock is unnecessary to contain her, and serves only as a plot device to tip off Logan that she’s in there.

Conclusion: The woman murdered in the cabin was a squatter who was going to rent the place to Jamie even though she had no right to it. Jamie saw the woman had a flyer with her face on it, so she murdered the woman right in front of Dani. Dani ran outside, losing a shoe in the process. While Jamie was busy finding a crawl space and moving the woman’s body so the plot could happen, Dani knocked on another woman’s door, and the woman decided she looked like a good replacement for the woman’s dead daughter and snatched and drugged her.

The End

This series goes on and on, but I’m not reading any more. This is just too stupid to waste any more of my precious time on.

I disposed of the B plot, such as it was, previously.

An Ineffective Search

In the A plot, the FBI has arrived to look for Dani, Logan’s daughter, who was kidnapped by Jamie, the daughter-by-rape of Dani’s deceased mother, Marie.

Here is a very important passage to remember from the previous book:

Jamie stood in front of the breakfast nook staring at her computer. Her plan was coming together. She had the funds, the new birth certificates and social security numbers. They both had new identities.

Now, the FBI doesn’t know about the new birth certificates, social security numbers, and new identities, but they do know about the funds. They also know that Jamie has absolutely no ties to the area. She has no relatives there. She’s never lived there except for a few days or possibly weeks while she hung out trying to get custody of Dani. In short, they know she has no reason to stick around, has every reason to get out of there, and has plenty of money to travel with.

We, the readers, do know about the new birth certificates, social security numbers, and new identities, and we also know she was planning to go to Portland.

Here’s the FBI agent explaining to Logan:

“It looks like Jamie had been planning this. She’d withdrawn all the money in her checking account regularly over the last few weeks, and even from her husband’s as well. She took everything he had in the bank and left. She even left behind her cards so we couldn’t trace them. Can you think of any place she might go?”

They know that Jamie slashed her own mother’s throat and buried her body in the back garden. They know she was determined to get hold of Dani. And they found Bonnie dead with her throat slashed, Dani missing, and Jamie also gone. This could, of course, all be a coincidence. Jamie ran off after burying her mother, one of the many serial killers in this small town slashed Bonnie’s throat, Dani saw this, panicked, and ran out the door, and some other person snatched her (hold that thought). But that’s not the way to place your bets.

So the FBI should be putting out APBs for Jamie’s car and alerting police departments around the country to look for Jamie and Dani. There’s no evidence that they’re doing that. Instead, they are acting exactly as the authorities act when a child goes missing and no one knows what happened. They put up flyers, and they go door to door in the local area. That makes no sense when you have every reason to believe the child was kidnapped and taken out of state.

But it’s okay; they’ve read the plot so they know Jamie’s still around. Pretty soon, they get a hit on their tip line. Someone in the immediate area, “an hour past Oceanway”, which seems to be the next town over, saw Jamie and Dani.

Why? Why is Jamie still here? Why isn’t she in Portland with Dani, chilling out with her new identity? Given the time elapsed, she could easily be in Portland, Maine, by now. Did the author (unlike me) just forget about the new birth certificates, social security numbers, and new identities, and the plan to go to Portland?

Logan overhears the FBI getting the address from the caller, and he and Riley go out to intrude on and contaminate the crime scene before the police get there. And here’s the cliffhanger to end the book as they find:

The blood splatter on the wall near the door caught my attention immediately.

But that wasn’t the most gut-wrenching sight. The pool of blood in front of the TV was large, thick, and dark. The blood had been there for a while. The floor in my kitchen flashed in my mind. It wasn’t that dark yet. 

In the middle, stuck in the gelatinous macabre pool, was a small shoe with Sailor Moon stickers on the sides.

We are meant to think, “Oh, no! Is Dani dead?”

My reaction was, “Who would have thought the child to have had so much blood in her?”

Obviously all that blood can’t have come from a seven-year-old child, and an experienced doctor ought to know that. So Dani wasn’t murdered there. She ran out or Jamie carried her out, and she lost a shoe along the way.

Details

The FBI did a pretty poor job of interviewing Jamie’s family before Logan and Riley went talk to them. It appears her husband, Chris, didn’t know what was going on.

The author has no clue how to write children’s dialogue. This is supposed to come from the mouth of a six-year-old, almost seven:

“Whether she comes back into this house or not is something we should talk about,” said Zoe.

Logan goes to Everly’s house, goes through her stuff (with her boyfriend’s permission), and find hatboxes in her closet with interesting papers, like her journal and her deceased husband’s will. The journal discloses that she had Marie smother her husband in his bed. It also contains this:

I know she doesn’t like the baby. I can see that. I can’t blame her. But maybe this is my chance to get it right. She is my grandchild, after all. Maybe this will give me a chance to get it right. Do all the things I should have done with Marie. I could make it right. Marie will just have to suck it up. Jamie is her child. If I can bear to look at Marie, then she can look at Jamie. It’s not that hard. I know what the nuns said at the school, but Marie will change her mind eventually. I did.

So it seems Marie was also the product of rape.

In addition to not knowing how to write children’s dialogue, the author doesn’t know probate. Consider this:

I started with the papers while he took an emerald-green journal out of the other box. The papers were a will. Not hers but her former husband’s. 

“Why would she have her husband’s will in a hat box?”

“If I had to take a guess, I would say it was to keep an eye on it. She could make sure that no one else got ahold of it. Was someone trying to challenge the will?”

I looked up. “I don’t know. I don’t know a lot about her marriage to him. He was dead by the time I met Marie. She didn’t seem like a big fan of his.”

That’s not how it works. Dani, daughter of Logan and Marie, is seven years old, so Everly’s husband has been dead eight years or more. His estate has been probated. If that is his last will, it should have been presented to the court, and it would remain in the files of the court clerk. It would not be in her hands.

So there are only two options. It isn’t his last will and she just kept it around while filing the later will in his probate case. More likely, it is his last will, and she suppressed it so she could inherit under a prior will or through intestacy. But she would not be holding onto that will to be sure no one contested it.

The B plot of book 4 is that yet another serial killer is operating in this area of small towns where everyone knows everything. This guy meets up with men hiking alone in the woods, injects them with a fast-acting paralytic agent, puts a bag over their head, and lets them suffocate. Multiple men have been found dead in this area with this very distinctive M.O., but naturally nobody noticed that they had a serial killer.

The world’s most idiotic clue

Once our intrepid investigators notice this, they finally go around investigating and learn that at least some of these men belonged to some secret club. Riley visits the house of one victim, Phil. Phil was an artist, and Riley has a hunch that something in his seven sketchbooks relates to his murder. His wife allows her to take the sketchbooks, and instead of examining them on the kitchen table in the house or going back to her police station with them, as she reasonably would, she goes to the local coffee shop. This coffee shop has samples of local artists’ art on the wall.

Riley finds a string of numbers in one of the sketchbooks:

7-1 4-25 1-82 3-121 2-27 5-14 6-93

She deduces that the first number in each pair is the sketchbook number and the second number is the page number. But the drawings don’t add up to anything, so she looks around and sees a long picture on the wall. She pulls it down, puts it next to the sketchbooks, and … mirabile visu! It’s those drawings all put together! So she turns the long picture over and finds “Whitman Ridge”. This turns out to be the building where the hush-hush secret no-girls-allowed club hangs out.

This is hands-down the world’s most idiotic clue. Phil picked out seven random pages in his sketchbooks, wrote out the clue, taped together seven sheets of paper where he copied the drawings from those random pages, took the taped-together sheets to the local coffee shop and asked to hang them, and wrote the name of the building on the back.

So if he happened to be murdered, and the police happened to examine his sketchbooks for no particular reason, and if they just so happened to figure out the number clue while sitting in the local coffee shop, as opposed to his home or the police station, they might notice a long drawing on the wall among the displays of works by local artists. And if they happened to lay out all the sketchbooks, open to the correct pages, alongside that one long drawing, they would see that they match. They could therefore turn over the drawing and see the name of the building where the mysterious club they’re looking for is headquartered.

Why — why — why would anybody do such a thing? It is ludicrously stupid. It is absurd. It is insulting to the reader. I can’t believe any reader looks at this, nods wisely, and says “Boy, Riley’s really sharp to pick up on that.”

And it would have been so easy to make this plausible. Riley goes through the sketchbooks, noting lots of birds and leaves and trees and nature things but also some drawings of buildings: his house, the courthouse, the coffee shop, etc. But when she gets to the end, she sees there are maybe twenty drawings of buildings, and half of them are of one specific building. She shows a drawing of that building to the barista, who doesn’t recognize it but calls over an older patron who says, “Oh, that’s the Whitman Ridge building.”

The hush-hush secret no-girls-allowed club

Riley gets the name of one of the members of the hush-hush secret no-girls-allowed club and threatens to tell his family about it. This threat works even though, at this point, she doesn’t know why this club is secret anyway. He shows up and spills the beans: in an area of small towns where everyone knows everything, there’s a secret club that caters to cannibals, runs orgies, brings in high-priced prostitutes, and generally provides whatever the patrons want, for a price.

Oh.

This is, by the way, quite disconnected from the serial killer targeting men hiking by themselves and doesn’t make a lot of sense anyway. I mean, how many men are in this depraved club, if dozens of them are men who like to hike by themselves?

It seems to me that the fraction of all men who like to hike alone is rather low, meaning the number of members of the hush-hush secret no-girls-allowed club must be quite high — in an area of small towns where everyone knows everything. Maybe you could manage that large of a club in a big city like NYC, but among small towns? The whole male population must have been involved!

Moreover, the club has to be large enough that a dozen men could vanish, half of them turning up murdered, without anyone noticing. Again, the whole male population must have been involved.

This could have worked just as well, and far more plausibly, if the hush-hush secret no-girls-allowed club were just a loose organization of men who liked to hike, get out in nature, and sometimes get together to talk about good hiking trails. They keep it quiet because they don’t want just anybody joining and ruining their comfortable atmosphere. In particular, they don’t want women joining, and they know if the organization is known, inevitably a woman will demand to join and they will have to let her in voluntarily or be sued and forced to let her in and pay damages to boot. They’re engaged in security through obscurity.

And it doesn’t matter anyway. The hush-hush secret no-girls-allowed club really has nothing to do with the murders except that’s where the killer met his victims. I guess, and this is only a guess, that we were meant to think that anyone who leaves the club is killed, and the serial killer is the enforcer. Except the serial killer only kills men hiking alone, and we learn from his convenient journal that he started his series of murders by accidentally knocking a man off a cliff.

The red herring

One of the murdered men turns out to be a copy-cat killing, since the poison was not used. This man was murdered by his son, who went to all the trouble to mimic the serial killer … and then went home and chopped up his mother. He was caught red-handed, covered in her blood. He then got angry and confessed with his lawyer sitting beside him telling him not to answer. I have a feeling that in reality, that confession would be thrown out.

But why stage the murder of his father and then chop up his mother right there in the house?

Return of the world’s most idiotic clue

The last victim of the serial killer is Gary, who was found dead in a canoe. Keith the coroner, the only competent member of the police department, deduces that Gary killed himself because Gary got a lesser dose of the paralytic poison. He needed to use it to look like a victim, but he couldn’t take a full dose because then he couldn’t drop the syringe overboard.

The police go to Gary’s store, search his office, and find his personal safe which, it turns out, contains his supply of paralytic poison. Hmm. What is the combination to Gary’s personal safe?

I know! It’s

7-1 4-25 1-82 3-121 2-27 5-14 6-93

Wait, what?

So Gary and Phil were chatting one day, and Phil explained his brilliant plan to guide the police to the Whitman Ridge building if he ever happened to be murdered. Gary said, “Oh, that’s cool. I just got a new personal safe, and I need a combination for it. Here, let me just jot down your code, and I’ll use that as my combination.”

This is so unbelievably stupid.

On to the A plot.

Moving on to the next book in the series, maybe I’m just tired of the plot holes. I didn’t make extensive notes this time.

One thing that really struck me about this book:

Logan was an ER doctor. His wife Marie was killed in a car accident, a hit-and-run.

Instantly images of Marie stuck in the windshield of our car flashed in my mind. Her face cut up by glass.

Why on earth would Logan, an ER doctor, be driving around with his wife not buckled in? He had ample experience with what happens to people who aren’t buckled in and usually doesn’t happen to people who are buckled in, like going through windshields. He should have refused to even start the car until all passengers were properly buckled in!

Casual cultists

The B plot is that three reporter-types are brutally murdered by being strangled into unconsciousness and then stabbed repeatedly by many people. The one thing they had in common is threatening notes from a cult demanding that the reporter-types report on them. Weirdly, the reporter-types all hid these notes, but the police found them. Why would they hide what appear to be notes from a nutcase? That’s never explained.

Anyway, following a bunch of breadcrumbs about people in Chicago, Riley determines that there’s a cult hanging out in a trailer park in her small town. She persuades a surviving reporter-type to go out and interview the leader of the cult, Sunflower, since the cult wants to be reported on. Sunflower freely admits to the murders twice, so Riley arrests her.

As the police start to take Sunflower away, the cultists close in on them, demanding that she be released. One goes after a cop, brandishing a knife, and another cop shoots him. The angry mob immediately turns to caring for the wounded (and I think dead) cultist, forgetting about their beloved cult leader. I’m just sure that’s how cultists would respond. The cops take Sunflower away, and the cult disappears from the story.

Jamie makes her move

The A plot is about Jamie. First off, she has to hide Everly’s body, which she literally buries in the back garden. Everly’s boyfriend shows up looking for her, and I honestly expected Jamie to kill him too. But she didn’t and he went away.

Although Everly seems to have tried to clean up her act towards the end, there’s a flashback where Jamie overhears Everly and Marie discussing the fact that Everly got Marie to hurry Everly’s husband into the grave. So there’s some serious homicidal tendencies in this family.

This is an important passage about Jamie:

Jamie stood in front of the breakfast nook staring at her computer. Her plan was coming together. She had the funds, the new birth certificates and social security numbers. They both had new identities.

She drained every account she had access to, so she had plenty of money. She also had a working car.

Logan was warned on three separate occasions to beware of Jamie. Warnings to Logan from his lawyer:

“If anything else happens or she [Jamie] shows up, call the police and then call me. If someone comes here and tries to take her, call me and then the police. Understand?”

“I feel obligated to warn you.” He took a deep breath. “I don’t think you’ll lose custody of Dani, but after the mediation… the way Jamie acted… she’s dangerous. I don’t know for sure if she started the fire when she was a kid, but if she did, I can’t imagine what she would do now. Don’t let Dani out of your sight. I honestly don’t think you’ve seen the last of her.”

Warning to Logan from a social worker:

“The person who made the complaint is someone you need to watch out for. I can’t get into particulars.”

“But?” I watched her for a long moment.

Her face twisted, and her mouth opened and closed several times before any words came out. “Keep Dani close. Just keep her close, and don’t let her out of your sight.”

So naturally Logan goes off to interview a witness about the fire that destroyed a Catholic school for wayward girls, a fire that killed sixty people, a fire that his wife, Marie, obviously set. His brother, Isaac, goes off to work or something, leaving Dani alone with her elderly nanny, Bonnie. Jamie strolls in, kills Bonnie by slashing her throat, and takes Dani away.

Exactly as the lawyer and social worker warned.

Carrying on from my previous comments, in Book 2, we get to see Jamie’s viewpoint. Jamie is psychotic. She has auditory hallucinations of Marie telling her she has to get her hands on Marie’s daughter, Dani. Starting off, this is how we perceive the family relationships:

Initial family relationships

There are at least three mentions in the book that Jamie would slit someone’s throat if she thought she could get away with it. Jamie thinks that once and Logan thinks it twice. That counts as foreshadowing, I guess.

Everly was supposed to be Jamie’s mother, but in the last few pages, she reveals that she is Jamie’s grandmother, with Jamie being Marie’s child by rape at age eleven. The viewpoint had managed to be pretty consistent in other chapters, but in this one, it head-hopped back and forth between Jamie and Everly, switching at least four times. Pick a viewpoint and stay there! Or at least have section dividers making it clear when the viewpoint jumps.

So the actual family relationships look like this:

Actual family relationships

Everly is explicitly said not to be the maternal type. There’s nothing anywhere to indicate she’s religious, except that she sent both problem children — Marie and Jamie — to a Catholic school for wayward girls. So when Marie got pregnant at eleven, why didn’t Everly take her for an abortion? And when the baby was born, Marie tried to drown her, so it’s not like Marie wanted her. Why didn’t Everly just put her up for adoption? For that matter, how did Everly keep Marie from smothering the baby? And then later, why did Marie switch to defending Jamie all the time?

In this book, Logan learns that Jamie was suspected of arson, specifically setting the Catholic school for wayward girls on fire, killing some thirty people at the time and causing the later deaths of some thirty more from their injuries. But there was no proof that she actually did it. Logan goes off to interview a survivor of the fire, but before he ever goes to interview the survivor, he learns that Marie was present at the fire for no good reason. However, she was never questioned. Although accelerants were used to start the fire, Jamie was thoroughly investigated, and there were no traces of accelerants anywhere on her.

I thought it was extremely obvious at that point that Marie started the fire, not Jamie. Logan was quite shocked when the survivor says she saw Marie go into the school library and come back out with the fire already burning behind her. So why on Earth didn’t the police follow up on Marie? In investigating a fatal arson, I’d be a lot more suspicious of a woman of twenty-four hanging around where she had no business than of a twelve-year-old girl who was supposed to be there. Especially with a witness who saw her in close proximity to the flames.

I suppose conceivably Marie felt guilty about trying to burn Jamie alive (Jamie was obviously the target), and that’s why Marie supported and defended the child that she’d tried to drown at birth. Or, since Jamie realized she was the target, Marie had to keep Jamie pacified so she didn’t go to the police.

Anyway, twice in this book and once in the following book, Logan is specifically warned that Jamie is a threat to Dani. Warnings to Logan from his lawyer:

“If anything else happens or she [Jamie] shows up, call the police and then call me. If someone comes here and tries to take her, call me and then the police. Understand?”

“I feel obligated to warn you.” He took a deep breath. “I don’t think you’ll lose custody of Dani, but after the mediation… the way Jamie acted… she’s dangerous. I don’t know for sure if she started the fire when she was a kid, but if she did, I can’t imagine what she would do now. Don’t let Dani out of your sight. I honestly don’t think you’ve seen the last of her.”

Warning to Logan from a social worker:

“The person who made the complaint is someone you need to watch out for. I can’t get into particulars.”

“But?” I watched her for a long moment.

Her face twisted, and her mouth opened and closed several times before any words came out. “Keep Dani close. Just keep her close, and don’t let her out of your sight.”

This book ends on a cliffhanger, as psycho Jamie brutally murders Everly:

In one swift, practiced motion, the knife slid across Everly’s throat.

A practiced motion. I wonder how many people Jamie has practiced this on.

In my previous comments, I said the killer cop, Blaese, had to have an accomplice to make the logistics work out.

I even have a suspect: his police partner, Rainwater. When word somehow leaked out that a cop was suspected, Rainwater hastened to tell Riley that Blaese did like to stop women who looked like his ex-wife and therefore like the two dead women they know about and the two missing women whose cars turned up in the same place. But, golly gosh, Rainwater didn’t say anything because “I was a rookie, and he was my superior.” Which is why, of course, Rainwater continued to keep his mouth shut even as the bodies turned up.

I can imagine how Rainwater became the accomplice of the killer cop, Blaese. Let’s say they’re sitting by the side of the road stopping the occasional speeder. It’s boring and they chat a bit. One day, Blaese stops a woman and she gives him some attitude. He lets her go, gets back in the patrol car, and gripes about women thinking they can just do what they want. Rainwater agrees, and as the days pass, they bond over their shared hatred of women. Then Blaese stops a woman who looks like his ex-wife, she gives him some static, and he strangles her right there on the spot. Rainwater responds with “Oh my god, you’re going to get caught!” instead of “That’s it; you’re under arrest.” And now Rainwater’s an accomplice helping Blaese move cars around.

My guess is on the occasions of the murders, they are both in the patrol car. Blaese pulls over a woman who matches his type, overpowers or kills her, and drives off while Rainwater stays in the patrol car making it look like an active police presence. Blaese cleans the woman’s car, dumps her body somewhere (two bodies are unaccounted for), drives the car to the farm/dump site, and calls Rainwater to come pick him up. They go back on patrol as if nothing happened.

Riley says this about Rainwater in the next book: “I believed in him until he proved me wrong.” That looks to me like sometime in the series, he’s going to prove her wrong. This story is first person past tense, so she’s narrating events in the past. If she was trying to convey that she was believing in him conditionally, she should have said something like, “I would believe in him unless he proved me wrong”. Or she could have just said, “I believed in him”, leaving it open whether he would prove her wrong later. But the writing is careless enough that I’m not sure whether this is actually intended to indicate that he will prove her wrong.

There’s a point I left out of the review. Blaese beat his then-wife into a miscarriage not once but several times, eventually rendering her unable to bear a child, and he smirked triumphantly when the doctor told her she couldn’t bear a child. This in a small town with one doctor. Not the current doctor, but his kind, beloved predecessor.

Cops do protect each other, but letting it slide that “Joe knocked Mary down — well, he was drunk and she’s a shrew” is infuriating, but also way different from letting it slide that “Joe beat Mary into miscarriages over and over and obviously enjoyed it.” Why didn’t the kind, beloved former doctor report this? To the State troopers if the local police won’t do anything?

It probably could have worked, or at least not set off my nonsense detector, if she’d just said he beat her up repeatedly. She could have hidden the results of a normal beating and never seen a doctor, but beatings severe enough to cause miscarriages? That’s a medical emergency and she had to have seen a doctor. Repeatedly.

And then we have consider Jamie.

A woman named Delilah disappears. We see her in the preface running for her life through the forest at night (which is also how the previous novel started). Her pursuer is catching up, so she picks up a branch, meaning to fight for her life. When we eventually meet the killer, there’s no evidence that she so much as scratched him. Oh, well.

So Delilah was driving to her parents’ house for a baby shower when she disappeared, car and all. In the course of searching for her near the road she would have followed, the police find a different woman who looks a lot like her but has been dead longer. That’s Rory. Having found Rory, the police give up the search for Delilah.

Um, okay.

It eventually occurs to the police that Delilah and Rory were both driving cars, and those cars have to be somewhere. After watching various videos about dive teams, I could have told them those cars could be in the nearest river or lake. There is an astonishing number of cars in lakes and rivers.

Anyway, they decide the cars were probably dumped somewhere and might have been towed off. Providentially both Rory’s and Delilah’s cars were both towed to the same tow yard. Here’s what they find about Rory’s car.

On her passenger seat rested her car registration. But everything else was missing. No purse, no phone, nothing.

…

I looked in the trunk. It was like someone took a vacuum cleaner and vacuumed out the trunk, then shampooed the carpet.

Note specifically that the car registration is there. They don’t particularly need it, of course; the car has a license tag, which is how they identified it as Rory’s in the first place.

Somebody took a lot of trouble cleaning this car up, presumably the killer. Why clean the trunk, by the way? Her car has a separate trunk compartment that they opened, so why would the killer think any evidence of his presence would be in the trunk? Unless he stuffed Rory in the trunk … but if he stuffed Rory in the trunk, why was she near the road where she was presumably snatched?

The experienced investigator, Riley, goes over to look at Delilah’s car.

“Did you find her registration?”

“No,” said Zelina. 

“I searched Rory’s car; all through the glove box, there was nothing there, except the registration on the front seat.”

Zelina opened the passenger side door and searched through the glove box. “Same here. Also, no purses, IDs, or her bags. She was coming for a few days; she had to pack some stuff. But it is all gone.”

So everything is gone. That is an important point.

Now, those two cars were abandoned at a cantankerous farmer’s farm during the nighttime on two different nights. My immediate question as I read this was, how did the killer leave? Barring teleportation, he walked or he took a car.

If he walked, he must have some sort of base nearby. I’d be investigating property owners within at least five miles. I’d be trying to find anyone who saw him walking. If he took a car, there has to be a second person involved. Unless he called for an Uber or got a friend to pick him up — twice! — he has to have an accomplice. He cannot have driven a second car out there to make his getaway. I’d be appealing for the Uber driver or friend to speak up.

I guess possibly he towed the victim’s car behind his own, but that should leave marks on the victim’s car, and again, they should be looking for a witness to that scenario as well.

At no point ever in this book do the experienced investigators puzzle over the question of how he left.

While we’re on this subject, where did he clean up these cars? Was he vacuuming and shampooing the cars in the middle of the night on the farm, hoping the farmer doesn’t wake up for a bio-break and notice lights outside? Was he hauling Delilah’s bags with him while he was walking away from the farm?

The only reasonable conclusion is that he has a base someplace where he cleaned up the cars. But then he had to drive the cars to the farm without leaving any biological evidence — fibers or hairs — so did he wear a hazmat suit? Scrub the seating compartment once he got there?

Oh, and while we’re considering logistics, Delilah must have been snatched somehow on the road between the gas station where she was last seen and her parents’ home, so the killer was on that road somehow. How did he get there? If he walked, that greatly narrows down the location of his base: it has to be walking distance from some point on that road. Did anyone see a pedestrian on or near that road that night? But if he drove, then he had two cars to deal with after he snatched Delilah or Rory.

We can be fairly sure he didn’t drive either car into the woods to temporarily hide it, not that these experienced investigators actually took any interest in this question. While they were looking for Delilah, there was a comment that there were no drag marks showing where a body was dragged into the woods. I think even these investigators would probably notice tire tracks going into the woods.

So, did the killer leave his own car sitting by the road while he dealt with her and her car? Did anyone see a car parked by that road that night? I’ll return to this question …

Since Rory and Delilah are very similar in appearance, they figure the killer has a type that he targets, so they look for missing persons who look like them. They find two such women, and those women’s cars were abandoned in the same place and towed to the same tow yard.

I opened the file. Not only did Nicky put together the list, but she also handed over an inventory list of each car. I placed the lists side by side. “Interesting.”

“What?”

“Those two women also had their cars towed from the same yard as Rory and Delilah. I have an inventory list of their cars. Both the women’s purses and phones were missing. Along with their licenses and registrations.”

And now, let’s watched them deduce that the killer is a policeman. Riley is the viewpoint character and she’s talking to Zelina and Captain Williams.

“If you are stopped by a cop and told to pull over. What’s the first thing you do?” I asked.

“Pull out my license and registration,” they both said. 

I leaned back in my chair. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. “

“Come into my office, you two.” I followed him to his office and sat down. A second later, Zelina joined us and closed the door behind her.

“What’s wrong?”

“Are you thinking that a cop did this?” he whispered.

“I think that’s possible. Now, don’t get me wrong, I hate to accuse a fellow officer of this, but what other conclusions can we draw?”

He moved around his desk and sat down. “There has to be another reason.”

I turned to face him. “Okay. But think about it. The victim’s license and registrations were gone. That’s the first thing you hand to a cop when you’re stopped; otherwise, why have it out? Look at the bodies, where they were found, and the evidence left behind.”

Yes, do look at the evidence left behind. Indeed, the victims’ licenses and registrations are gone, but so is everything else. The contents of glove compartments. The purses. The cellphones. The bags that Delilah had because she was going to stay for a while. Everything. There is nothing unique about the licenses and registrations being gone and, I might add, Rory’s registration was, weirdly, left behind.

They’re right, of course, because the author says so. The killer is a cop.

But, you know, the frustrating thing is that they actually could reasonably deduce that the killer is a cop. Watch:

Riley: This doesn’t make sense. Look, Delilah gassed up here, right? And the CCTV shows she was safe and alone when she left. There was no reason for her to stop from there until she got to her sister’s house.

Zelina shrugs: The killer stopped her.

Riley: Right, but how? No damage to the car — no damage to any of the four cars, in fact. He didn’t run her off the road, or scatter caltrops to flatten her tires, or anything like that. She had to stop voluntarily. They all did. How did the killer *make* them stop?

Zelina stares at her: You can’t think — maybe he fakes an accident …

Riley: Passersby would call 911 if he faked an accident. Anyway, the killer has a type. He stops women who look like Delilah. How? Why do they stop? Come on, you know the answer.

Zelina: Because he’s a cop. Because he pulls them over.

Riley: Exactly.

So, it’s possible to plausibly deduce that the killer is cop. But now, go back to the question of two cars by the road. He’s stopped a woman. He strangles her and stuffs her in her trunk, or just stuffs her in her trunk, or chases her through the woods if she runs for it. Then he drives her car off somewhere to store it until he can clean and dump it, then he …

Then he what? Hikes back to his patrol car, still sitting by the road? Wouldn’t a patrol car sitting there empty for a long time attract attention? Wouldn’t someone notice and call in to report it, being concerned that something has happened to the police officer who should have been in that car?

For all this to work, he almost has to have an accomplice to move the patrol car or the victim’s car, and to bring a second car when the victim’s car is abandoned. The question of whether he has an accomplice and who it might be once they know who the killer is, is never so much as mentioned.

Okay, now consider this. Look at the “deduction” that the killer is a cop. We have three people: Riley, Zelina, and Captain Williams. As soon as Riley hints that the killer is a cop, Captain Williams takes them in his office and whispers about the possibility. Later, a woman turns up to talk to them:

“Yes. We will take any information you can give us. It would be much appreciated,” I said.

“Right. Well, I don’t know if this is pertinent to your investigation.” She glanced at the captain for a moment. “But I heard that you all believe an officer did this. To those women.”

Zelina, Williams, and I traded glances. “Where did you hear that?”

“Rumor going around town. I was at the coffee shop and heard some people talking about it.”

Zelina, Williams, and Riley ought to be looking at each other. Only those three were present when they “deduced” the killer was a cop, and they kept it very quiet, though they had to tell Keith the coroner, who had his people go over the car for prints. I’m not clear why that’s Keith’s responsibility. But anyway, they kept their cards close to the chest, so who talked? Riley, the viewpoint character, says she didn’t, and Williams was whispering about it. So was it Keith or Zelina?

That’s never addressed, by the way.

And then there’s this scene. They’d been trying to subtly question the killer cop when he up and left:

My fingers drummed against the table while I replayed my time with him in my mind. Before I left, he was fine, but once I came back, it was like something changed. A switch had been flipped, and I just needed to know what flipped it. I stared at the files on the table. He had looked through them. Did something in the files tip him off?

“What happened?” Zelina burst through the doors. “Why did he leave?”

“He gave me his alibis for the times the women went missing, and then he left. Told me to check them and then apologize to him.” Z’s eyebrow raised.

“Are you serious? What did you say?”

I threw my hands up. “I don’t know. I was just running it through my mind. Everything was fine until I got up and left the room. When I came back, it was like he knew what we were trying to do.”

What do you suppose happened? How did he figure it out? Your guess is as good as mine, because that’s never addressed either.

They bring in his former wife, figuring he’s been killing women who look like her, and he conveniently confesses in full before lunging across the table to try to kill her. So that wraps up the murder mystery. Except for the identity of his accomplice, of course.

I already went over the (*ugh*) romance. So here are some points that I particularly noticed.

The phone rang and she [his nurse] picked it up. “All the ladies want to work here to look at you.”

The caller must have found that comment interesting.

Mackenzie was the first student to walk through the door with a scowl on her face. She looked exactly how I imagined her: shiny blonde hair, bright blue doe-like eyes, and a cruel smile. She smiled when she walked in, which I found strange.

Wait, what? She walked in with a scowl and a cruel smile simultaneously?

Mackenzie Evans was the first student on my list—the only student, really.

A few pages later:

Ms. Claudia opened the door and walked her [Mackenzie] out of the room.

…

The door opened again. Ms. Claudia stepped into the room with a male student following close behind. She closed the door behind him. “This is James McGaven. He’s friends with Tiffany.”

So, uh, Ms. Claudia is out trolling for students for the police to interview without discussing this with the police?

Jamie had a permanent grin on her face that made both Isaac and I uneasy.

Jamie is Logan’s sister-in-law and Isaac is his brother. This grammatical error just sets my teeth on edge! No one would say, “Her grin made I uneasy”, and putting “both Isaac and” in front of “I” doesn’t make it any more correct!

And here, our intrepid hero, Riley, invades a crime scene:

Crime scene techs and officers moved around like flies, looking for somewhere to land. One tech moved past me and headed down the hall. I followed him.

…

“Who are you?” 

Silence rippled through the room. I barely noticed it. My eyes were fixed on the bodies. Why now? Why kill him now? Opportunity, or was it something else?

“Excuse me?”

My eyes darted up and stared at the man who stood in the doorway. Judging by his clothes, he was an Oceanway detective. He stared at me expectantly. I held up my badge and inched toward the door. “What is a Pine Brooke detective doing here?”

I shrugged. “I had some questions for Mr. Jameson. Went to his office, and he wasn’t there. So, we came here.”

“Well, you found him. Sorry, he can’t answer your questions.” He glanced at the bodies. “Now, I need you out of my crime scene, if you don’t mind.”

Oh, by the way, this double murder is never explained. Who killed this lawyer and his wife as they slept, and why? It seems related to Riley’s having contacted him about a client who was the brother of a missing girl, but who knows? Who cares?

At last, we come across A Clue. A girl disappeared for almost two weeks and was found dead in a condition that showed she’d been brutally tortured and raped over that period. Now we learn that Mr. Craster gave her a ride home on the last day that she was seen alive.

Mr. Craster neglected to mention this to anybody when she was reported dead. He says he dropped her off down the street so her parents wouldn’t see him, because she asked him to. Of course. But he’s a nice guy who helps everybody, and he says he saw a red car outside her house when he dropped her off. So there’s no need to look into nice Mr. Craster any further, even though he’s the last person to see her alive.

It seemed unusual that so far three girls had gone missing within the last year or so, and no one had picked up on it until now. But then again, we just figured it out ourselves.  We both had our assignments. I searched through our database and found three more missing girls going back as far as six years.

Yes, it does seem unusual. In a small town without a lot of crime, three girls go missing from a school in a year and are reported missing, three more disappear within the past six years, and a red car is noticed hanging around just before several of them disappear? With all this, the small town police don’t even notice there’s a pattern?

These are seriously incompetent cops.

Another body being found in the same spot as Jade could have meant a variety of things. It could have meant that Jade wasn’t the only person killed that night. Maybe she was taken with another person, and they were both taken to the hill to be killed. It could also mean that we might have a serial killer on our hands. It might seem like a large jump to reach that conclusion, but it was plausible.

If somebody snatched two people and killed them, isn’t that somebody by definition a serial killer? It doesn’t strike me as a large jump at all.

I should point out that when the investigators went to look around the place where Jade’s body was found, they saw beer cans and used condoms, and Riley said teens had always hung out there, even when she was a teen.

Riley finally twigged to Craster by a fluke: there was a hermit who had video cameras on his house that no one knew about. Which means Craster was hauling dead girls out there near the hermit’s house and figuring the guy would never look out the window. Putting that aside, the police should have already been suspicious of Craster, the last one to see Jade alive.

So they finally talk to his son, Boston, who freely discloses that Craster is a domestic abuser, that his wife (Boston’s mother, Lydia) vanished one night, and that while Craster doesn’t have a red car, his new wife does. That would be the new wife that no one ever sees and that Boston believes is a captive in the house. Boston didn’t see any need to make an anonymous call to the police about the new wife, of course.

Riley and her partner go out to talk to the new wife, Lydia, who gives them the address of Craster’s cabin and says she won’t call ahead to warn him they’re coming. She sure sounds like a captive, doesn’t she? They track Craster to his cabin and find him with a tied-up girl, and in the ensuing fight, they shoot him. Non-fatally, unfortunately. And then they find lots of pictures of his previous wife, pictures of her when she was dead.

Now I’ve got some logistics questions. Craster is a long-haul trucker. How does a long-haul trucker keep his wife captive for the days on end that he’s gone? She was perfectly happy to help the police by giving them the address of his cabin and not calling him to warn him they’re coming. So why didn’t she just leave or go to the police while he was gone?

We know how he kept the girls captive: he tied them up and left them, and if they died of thirst while he was gone, he just buried them in the back garden, and when that was full, he buried them on the hillside. The hillside near the hermit’s house. The hillside where the local teens partied and left beer cans and used condoms. Why didn’t any of those teens notice fresh shallow graves on their party hill?

And now, the mother of all plot holes:

Jade, the victim who was first found, got away because, after raping and torturing her for two weeks, Craster put her in the trunk of his car, drove her up near the hermit’s place, and opened the trunk. She then ran for her life and fell over a cliff in the darkness, breaking her neck and dying.

Now, I can see why Craster didn’t climb down the cliff in the dark to retrieve her body, but why did he bring her out there alive in the first place? Why not kill her in the peace and quiet of his home and take her body out there to bury? He had been so careful before, and had committed apparently dozens of murders across the country including more than a dozen in this small town, that it beggars belief that he’d just forget to kill this one.

And finally … did you catch that Boston’s mother and Craster’s second wife were both named Lydia? It appears the author didn’t.

This one includes a “meet ugly” growing into an “enemies to lovers” trope. Ugh.

The protagonist, Riley, is a police detective who sprained her wrist and went to see the new doctor in town, Logan.

“How did you do this to yourself?” His tone flat, like he didn’t really care.

“Arresting a drug dealer. He was stronger than he looked.”

“People often are.” He sighed as he took some bandages and started wrapping my wrist. “It’s just a sprain. Nothing is broken but you should take it easy for a couple of days. Ice it when you get home and if the pain gets to be too much take some Tylenol.” He finished wrapping my hand. “Are you right-handed?”

“Yup.”

“That’s going to suck,” he said as he let go of my hand and started gathering his supplies to put back in the cabinet.

“Anyone ever tell you, you have a lovely bedside manner? I imagine it doesn’t come up a lot.”

He closed the cabinet and leaned against it, arms folded across his chest. “You know what, I’ve actually been told I was perfectly pleasant.”

“By anyone other than your mother?”

A smile pulled at the corner of his mouth. “A lot of my patients.”

“Their bar must be pretty low. If you can’t be nice to your patients or put some concern in your tone maybe you ought to find another profession.” I headed toward the door.

“Maybe you should find another doctor… if only there was another clinic around here… hmm.”

So you can see she’s a charming person who takes offense because he doesn’t get all warm and chatty with her while examining and bandaging her sprained wrist. I don’t expect medical people to be anything more than businesslike with me, as he is here. If they’re more friendly, that’s a bonus, but especially here, where there’s no established relationship between them and the problem is straightforward, I don’t see why she expects anything more and gets offended and insults him when he’s just businesslike.

The next time they met was in her mother’s coffee shop, where he thanked her mother and walked away, possibly not even seeing her walk in. She thinks,

He could be nice to my mother but clipped with me. What was that about?

So on a different day, when he might have had different problems on his mind, in a different environment where expectations are different, he is conventionally polite, and this offends her.

Later, he’s not paying attention and bumps into her while walking, and she makes a joke that falls flat. This is from his point of view.

I turned around to see Riley there, her expression a mix of shock and fury. “Excuse you.”

“Sorry,” I managed. It was more of a mumble than anything else. “I wasn’t watching where I was going.”

She pressed her lips in a line.“Well, make sure you don’t make a habit of that. I wouldn’t want to have to give you a ticket for reckless walking.”

I could tell that she was trying to lighten the mood with a joke, but I could barely even stand to be in this conversation right now. “Sure.” I turned back toward the diner and barely made one step before she spoke again.

“Actually, I needed to talk to you.”

I sighed loudly and turned around. “What do you want?”

Her eyebrows shot up. “I just wanted to ask you a question, maybe without the attitude.”

“I don’t understand how you can dislike my attitude so much and yet still go out of your way to talk to me. I am avoidable.”

Riley threw her hands up and stumbled back. “Well, excuse me for thinking a doctor could help me.”

“You are excused, now, please go away.”

Her eyes narrowed at me. “It’s a wonder you have any patients.”

“It’s a wonder you solve any cases. Now excuse me while I avoid you like the plague since my attitude is so disagreeable to you.” I turned away. When I reached the door to the diner, I heard her say ‘asshole’ under her breath.

He was obviously distracted; she knew he’d suffered something horrible, apparently pertaining to his wife’s recent death. They’re both being nasty in this scene, but she could just let it go. She doesn’t, even though she started the nastiness in both this and the previous case.

Riley and her partner go to the local diner, which is crowded, and the doctor’s nurse invites them to sit at their table:

I positioned myself on the edge of the booth next to her boss, the doctor with an annoying attitude. He didn’t even look up when he slid over, closer to the window, like he couldn’t stand to sit next to me.

If someone I don’t really know sits next to me on a booth, I’m going to scoot over to give them room. Obviously. I’d do it even if I did know them well. She, of course, takes this as an insult.

Rude doctor didn’t say anything, too busy staring out the window to be bothered with our little conversation. Nicole kept glancing out the window like she was expecting him to contribute. He didn’t even look at her. I took out my phone and started flipping through it, trying desperately to ignore how good he smelled—like eucalyptus, clean and fresh—and how broad his shoulders were.

Ah, there we go with the romance.

I focused on my phone. I hadn’t noticed when he moved in closer. His elbow brushed against mine, causing me to look up.

“Oh, sorry. Wouldn’t want to be disagreeable to you,” I snapped.

I expected him to fire back just as hard, but I was surprised when he sighed. “I’m sorry about the other day. I was mad about… something else, and I shouldn’t have taken it out on you.”

“Hope you sorted that something else out.”

He gave me a weak smile. “I’m trying. I really am, but it looks like it will be around for a while. In any case, that doesn’t mean I had to blow up at you like that.”

I chewed my bottom lip for a moment. “Apology accepted, I guess. But dude, you got to work on your bedside manner.”

Ugh. She started the nastiness, and he apologized for it. At no point in the whole book does she ever apologize to him for it. And notice that she only grudgingly accepts his apology and immediately criticizes him again.

And here, in his viewpoint, the tedious romance has officially begun:

I nodded slowly. I wondered what her process was when solving a case. I wondered what it felt like to put a bad guy away. I wondered if she had ever been shot. Her job was so dangerous. I wondered if she had any cold cases… I wondered if she was single…

I shook the last thought out of my mind. Shoved it into a box and locked it. It didn’t matter. I wasn’t ready for anything. and she didn’t like me. I was an ass to her when I first met her and a few times after that.

She was an ass to him when they first met, not vice versa.

I didn’t notice this when I first read the book, because my vision isn’t great and it’s hard for me to distinguish periods and commas, but when I blew up the size of the text, look at this:

Circled in red is a period. That should have been a comma or else the next letter should have been capitalized.

The review continues.