Author: Craig Holden
The Blurb: Its 9.00 on a Sunday morning in a city deep in America’s midwest. Bank Arbaugh and Mack Steiner have just come off the night shift. Sitting in a cafe waiting for breakfast, they get a call over the radio – a teenage girl is missing.With a glance, the 2 cops – friends since childhood and close as brothers – know that their lives have shifted off balance. Seven years before, Bank’s own daughter disappeared and has never been found.
Ok, so the blurb looks promising…. too promising perhaps because I was personally disappointed with this book. Why didn’t I enjoy it despite being a huge crime fiction aficionado ?
First, I was expecting some sort of great crime solving, detective work with startling clues that move across time. When the “mystery” was finally solved, it was deflating. The book is more about how the 2 characters cope with their personal and professional lives and how their inherent personality traits affect or help them in their jobs.
Since it deals with the kidnapping of 2 teenage girls, it predictably deals with issues of child abuse. Now, I’m not pointing that out as a negative per se. But my problem was with the fact that the entire gamut of issues concerning child abuse is dealt with in the form of a monologue from one character to another. That, to me, seems implausible.
The chapters alternate between the two cases and the occasional chapter deals with the childhood friendship of Mack and Bank. The problem here is that the descriptions of the crime scenes, the town, the scenery, etc. get so heavy that it gets confusing. At one point, I had to go back to the previous chapter just to check whether it was the past or the present.
Bottomline: I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.
The Resurgent Bookworm 
I agree 100%. I’m a huge thriller and crime fiction fan, and I’ve been known to forgive a multitude of ills for the sake of a good story. I just wasn’t able to get into this one. It just didn’t seem to be much of a thriller, more of a coping-in-the-horrible-aftermath drama. Also, the editor should have worked harder. I found many of the description passages similarly confusing, and overwrought, too. Anyway – enough with the missive. Bottom line is, I enjoyed your review!
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Good to see someone who agrees with me 🙂 I saw hundreds of very positive reviews on goodreads after I wrote this post and I wasn’t sure what to make of it. With respect to the descriptions, at one point I was like “enough with the lakes and parks already!”
Thank you ! 🙂
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