The Girl Who Was Taken by Charlie Donlea

Author : Charlie Donlea
Title : The Girl Who Was Taken
Published : 2017
Publisher : Pinnacle Books
Pages : 320
Genre : Mystery / Thriller

     The night they go missing, high school seniors Nicole Cutty and Megan McDonald are at a beach party in their small town of Emerson Bay, North Carolina. Police launch a massive search, but the hope is almost lost--until Megan escapes from a bunker deep in the woods. . . . A year later, the bestselling account of her ordeal has made Megan a celebrity. It's a triumphant story, except for one inconvenient detail: Nicole is still missing. Nicole's older sister, Livia, a fellow in forensic pathology, expects that one day soon Nicole's body will be found and her sister's fate determined. Instead, the first clue comes from another body--that of a young man connected to Nicole's past. Livia reaches out to Megan to learn more about that fateful night. Other girls have disappeared, and she's increasingly sure the cases are connected. Megan knows more than she revealed in her book. Flashes of memory are pointing to something more monstrous than she described. And the deeper she and Livia dig, the more they realize that sometimes true terror lies in finding exactly what you've been looking for . . .

     This was my first time reading a book by Donlea and I wasn't really sure what to expect. The tail of girls abducted is one that has come up more quite a lot. Usually in the form of some detective trying to racer against time in the hunt to find a girl before it's all too late. But when it comes to this authors book things are all a little bit more close to home. For Livia, it is a quest to try and get to the truth of what happened to her sister. She is trying her best to not only balance her work as a forensic pathologist but to get to the truth. It does allow her more insight into the criminal world she has a way of seeing clues that would otherwise slip by. But there is also the emotional total to be paid. It can cloud judgment and things that should be obvious get lost in the haze. She is a character that comes off the page well feeling more real than sometimes is possible in such novels. She also allows them to pick up clues and see how they may fit into the bigger picture. 

    The book is told from to point in time giving us Livia's race to see what happened to her sister but also all the events that lead up to the abduction of these two girls. It is within these sections that we get to try and piece together what the hell took place. This is no ordinary series of events, there are certain aspect to this story that takes us away from the usual series of actions that we would expect to find. For me, this gave me something to sink my teeth into above and beyond the usual.  I can say with absolute certainty that going into this book it was not what I was expecting it all become a very strange and weird series of events that give the reader something to stop and think about. It blurs the lines on what you might think about such stories and adds another great layer to the plot. This is all told in a style that flows well as we gain little glimpses of insight as the pages turn. For me, the mystery of the novel is well above what I had come to think it would be and I was left guessing right up until the end as to what had really happened on that fateful night. 

     For me there was a great deal to love about this book, the author kept me glued to the pages trying to figure out the great mystery of the novel. But he also delved some interesting characters to get behind., When we see them develop along the way I also had to change how I saw each one of them. This is a book where it becomes ever more apparent that those we can trust can shift in the blink of an eye and how when people keep secrets the truth can keep slipping out of our hands. So if you can get hold of what really happened you better be prepared to follow it no matter where it goes, even if it means ripping apart everything you think you know.