by Karen Rose
Few thrillers have grabbed my attention like this one … four days and 500 pages of intelligent text, a powerful plot involving missing girls, an inherited house, changed identities, secrets and lies and gutsy protagonists passed in a second.
Karen Rose has that rare capacity of keeping your attention as she plays havoc with your powers of detection.
No one is perfect; everyone has a character flaw, though some make mistakes for the right reasons.
The girl of the hour is a psychologist working with sex offenders and their victims, breaking the rules and becoming a target and potential victim herself, dozens of times. That the perpetrator doesn’t succeed, doesn’t try your patience … you buy into the reasoning.
One by one Rose introduces more characters and possible perps, each plausible, each distasteful or not. That the psychologist draws innocent people into the web and many innocents die is indisputable; that she wears the guilt heavily, not so.
Even after the killer is revealed, Rose keeps your attention. She does it in other ways too – the spark between the psychologist and the superhero agent with his own demons is so tangible you feel you are intruding.
You have eavesdropped too much on a developing relationship, one which after only four days is in embryonic stage but you want to go full term.
At the end, you feel you know the characters better than your own family.
Rose, whose 15 or so other novels have reaped praise for being fast and furious on many best-selling lists, has done it again.