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.