Stranger in Town

       


Review of Stranger in Town by Cheryl Bradshaw


Overview from www.barnesandnoble.com: Six-year-old Olivia Hathaway tiptoes down the center aisle of Maybelle's Market, stopping once to glance over her shoulder and make sure her mother isn't watching. But Mrs. Hathaway is too preoccupied to notice her daughter has slipped away. Minutes later, a frantic Mrs. Hathaway runs up and down the aisles, desperately searching for her missing daughter. But Olivia is already gone. Will PI Sloane Monroe find her before it's too late?

My Review:

A young girl is taken from a local store. The only witness to the kidnapping, an elderly woman, is dead, stabbed and run over by perpetrator’s car. As the years go by, the community never forgets.

But when another girl is kidnapped, her father is convinced that the same man has kidnapped his Savanah. He doesn’t trust the police any longer so he hires our protagonist, Sloane Monroe, a private investigator, to find his daughter and follow up on the lead he thinks he’s found.

Though this story is in many ways a typical thriller/mystery, the kidnapping is different angle from most of the novels in this genre that I usually read. For one thing the crimes are years apart from one another. And for another, two of the victims are children.

The progression of the story didn’t hold many surprises. In a way, it was probably more realistic than most thrillers since Sloane seems to know what she’s doing. She has solved every case she’s taken on or so says a police detective named Cade who later teams up with Sloane. He checked her out before making the offer apparently.

The same characteristic makes her somewhat less interesting of a detective however. She comes up against a few walls but all in all she’s a regular, modern, female, version of Sherlock Holmes. She just searches for the evidence to back up her assertions.

What kept me reading was the plot. I wanted to see if Sloane would be right or way off the mark and have to start all over again. Most of all I wanted to know why once I knew who. It didn’t make sense to me, even the way Sloane explained it Cade. Maybe that’s why no one takes her theory seriously, at first.

I didn’t want to say more since I am trying to avoid any spoilers here. Of course you can find out more by reading it. I liked it but only for readers who aren’t expecting any big surprises in their mystery/thriller novels.

Contains: some language