Review: Sister Where Are You (Patterson Blake FBI Mystery, #1) by A.M. Strong & Sonya Sargent

    

Print Length: 336 pages

Publisher: West Street Publishing (January 20, 2022)

From Goodreads.com: FBI Special Agent Patterson Blake has accepted that the disappearance of her sister Julie sixteen years ago will never be solved. Until shocking new evidence comes to light that makes her question everything she thought she knew.

When the grisly dumping ground of a twisted serial killer is discovered, it looks like she may have found her sister's final resting spot. This sadistic murderer has been taking girls for decades and leaving them chained up, alone and terrified, to die a slow and gruesome death. Was her sister a victim of this deranged psychopath?

Now another woman has been taken, and time is running out to save her.

In her quest to find the killer and discover the truth about her sister, the young FBI agent will soon discover that the past is a dangerous place, and those who dwell within are still out there, waiting for new prey.

And in Patterson Blake, they might just have found it...

                                                         *******************

My Rating: 1 star out of 5

This book promised to be a "A taut, edge-of-your-seat psychological crime thriller with a twist you won’t see coming", however I found it to be none of these things. 

Don't get me wrong, the opening two chapters were fantastic. The first one set the scene from the killer's point of view, showcasing the exact horrors that this individual was capable of. The next gave us some insight into Agent Blake's personal trauma at having lost her sister sixteen years ago and not having any closure or even answers as to what happened to her. In fact, she messes up so badly that she is put on leave. Leave that she decides to use to try and figure out what happened to her sister all those years ago. 

What follows however, was an absolute mess of a story. To begin with Patterson is such an unlikable character that I found it very hard to care about her or what happened to her. To begin with, she is dating her direct supervisor (which I would have thought would be heavily frowned upon in the FBI but whatever), and when she isn't using him and their relationship to gain favors, she is angry with him and/or arguing with him because he won't against the rules and potentially lose his own job to help her. When she gets to Oklahoma City, she checks into the same seedy hotel as the one her sister once stayed in. And immediately starts harassing the manager for the registration card from her sister's stay all those years ago. When he keeps putting her off (and why wouldn't he), she first wishes she could arrest him simply for being a jerk. Then later, she pulls out her FBI credentials (after promising she would lay low and NOT do that exact thing) in an effort to force his cooperation. Finally (and by this point I was starting to have more sympathy for the hotel manager than her), he gives her the information she requested, only to have her request even more, essentially forcing him to go outside to the dumpster and retrieve it (when she could have easily done that herself if she wanted it that bad). 

Her being an absolute nightmare of a character isn't her only flaw however. You see, dear Patterson also seems to think that she knows better than everyone else consistently putting down other law enforcement agencies (even if its only in her own mind) and believing that they didn't a good enough job investigating this crime or that crime. Either they didn't ask the right questions, or they didn't push, or they just "did nothing". 

It got old. Fast. 

Maybe not as fast as constantly reading about her going back to her hovel of a rented room, or her eating takeout, or washing her face and cleaning her teeth. There were literally so many examples of this that could have been deleted altogether and the book would have lost nothing except the word count. 

The plot as a whole was...... meh at best. It had its moments, but on the whole was overshadowed by inconsistences and plot holes. At one point they think they have a suspect due to trail cameras, but those same cameras don't show the actual dump site being approached, yet they still send FIVE people to a man's home to bring him in for questioning? Someone who may or may not have a direct link to one of the victims is allowed to be looped in on what's going on? And then later given clearance to continue to investigate her own sister's disappearance? Come on. 

And while the Julie's disappearance was interesting, I'm not sure I want to continue on for another six books before finally finding out what happened to her. But never say never, I may find myself in a reading slump at some point and find myself picking up another book in this series just to see if Patterson grows as a character or not.