Review: Where Lost Girls Go (Detective Casey White #1) by B.R. Spangler

                                                                   

Print Length: 366 pages

Publisher: B.R. Spangler (May 15, 2020) 

From Goodreads.com: “Help me,” the girl cries, alone in the forest, shivering in her nightgown, her small frame almost lost between the trees. “Please.”

When Detective Casey White discovers the body of a beautiful teenage girl in a white nightgown near the shoreline in North Carolina’s Outer Banks, a familiar fear floods through her. Could this be Hannah, her sweet, blue-eyed daughter snatched from home fourteen years ago? But it only takes one look to confirm that the girl with dark bruising around her throat is another family’s tragedy.

Putting her own grief aside, Casey digs into unsolved missing child cases in the area. The victim is Cheryl Parry, one of two little girls taken during a family beach vacation nine years ago. Her sister’s body was found strangled a week later, but someone has been keeping Cheryl alive—until now.

Fearful there may be other innocent lives in danger, Casey and her team work around the clock to trace the material from Cheryl’s nightgown, but hit a dead end and don’t know where to turn. Then, another teenager’s body is found in a nearby pine forest, dressed all in white. It’s suddenly clear that a twisted killer has been hiding in the Outer Banks for years, and he will strike again.

Casey painstakingly combs the forest soil for clues to the killer’s next move, but nothing prepares her for what she finds: a buried charm bracelet exactly matching one that her little Hannah always wore—right down to the broken star charm by the clasp…

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My Rating: DNF at 14%

I've said it before, and I will say it again. Life is too short to force yourself to read a novel that you're just not enjoying. And this book was such a hot mess even in the short time I spent with it, that I could not justify dedicating any more of my time to it when there are so many other (hopefully better written) books out there. 

Right from the start, the story was riddled with moments that pulled me completely out of the narrative. Claire discovers a young, pregnant woman in desperate need of medical attention on the side of the road and rushes her to the hospital. Fair enough. But we're told the girl is placed in the backseat of the car, and somehow Claire manages to keep her eyes on the road while simultaneously keeping a hand on the girl's distended stomach hoping to feel the baby move. Unless Claire has somehow mastered the art of extending her arms several feet behind her while driving, I'm not entirely sure how this was supposed to work.

And somehow the questionable logic only gets worse from there. After requesting a police escort and delivering this severely injured young woman to the hospital, said officer doesn't immediately question Claire? Doesn't call for backup? Not a single person asks for her name, contact information, or even basic details about where and how she found the victim while those facts are still fresh in her mind? Apparently everyone just collectively decides that information can wait.

Then we get to the dream sequence, aka, the incident that resulted in Claire being placed on a "forced vacation" in the first place. Honestly? This may have been the point where I started seriously questioning what I was reading. Officers are surrounding a vehicle connected to a suspect from another case when Claire suddenly becomes convinced it's the same car driven by the woman who abducted her daughter years earlier. She even believes she sees the same eyes staring back at her through the windshield. Naturally, she rushes into an active police situation with her gun drawn and the safety off, demanding the occupant exit the vehicle.

The occupant turns out to be... another police officer. And a male one at that. And just why was a police officer sitting in the driver's seat of a vehicle surrounded by other officers? Excellent question. Unfortunately, the book doesn't seem particularly interested in answering it.

As if that weren't enough, the inconsistencies start piling up so rapidly afterward that they become even more impossible to ignore. Casey first encounters Jericho at the hospital, where he mentions that a victim has already been transported to the medical examiner and specifically notes that the examiner doesn't appreciate interruptions. Yet Casey immediately heads to the scene anyway because the victim loosely fits the incredibly broad criteria she's established for potential matches to her long-missing daughter. Once there, she notes that Jericho isn't anywhere around. Then moments later he's suddenly standing right there. Except now he's no longer Jericho; he's once again being referred to as "the marine-patrol officer Flynn." Naturally, this is followed by the obligatory scene where she calls him Mr. Flynn and he insists she call him Jericho instead.

At this point my eye was already twitching and I'd mostly checked out mentally, but I kept pushing forward hoping things would improve. Instead, within the span of just a few pages, Jericho uses his teeth to pull a cigarette from a pack, examines it, puts it back, and then somehow appears to be smoking that same cigarette moments later. Meanwhile Casey, who again, has been placed on leave from her job, essentially talks her way into helping local law enforcement investigate the case despite having little more than her badge as proof that she's a detective. And honestly, shouldn't surrendering that badge have been one of the first things that happened when she was forced off duty?

There are plenty of other issues I could point to, but listing every inconsistency would probably make this review longer than the time I spent on the book itself. That said, every book has its audience, and there will undoubtedly be readers who connect with this one far more than I did.