LOST ONES, THE by Sheena Kamal - BOOK - ADVANCE READING COPY

It begins with a phone call that Nora Watts has dreaded for fifteen years—since the day she gave her newborn daughter up for adoption. Bonnie has vanished. The police consider her a chronic runaway and aren’t looking, leaving her desperate adoptive parents to reach out to her birth mother as a last hope.

A biracial product of the foster system, transient, homeless, scarred by a past filled with pain and violence, Nora knows intimately what happens to vulnerable girls on the streets. Caring despite herself, she sets out to find Bonnie with her only companion, her mutt Whisper, knowing she risks reopening wounds that have never really healed—and plunging into the darkness with little to protect her but her instincts and a freakish ability to detect truth from lies.

The search uncovers a puzzling conspiracy that leads Nora on a harrowing journey of deception and violence, from the gloomy rain-soaked streets of Vancouver, to the icy white mountains of the Canadian interior, to the beautiful and dangerous island where she will face her most terrifying demon. All to save a girl she wishes had never been born.

FBI profiler Karen Vail can’t catch a break. After her last case (detailed in Inmate 1577), she is needed in England to solve the bombing of a London art gallery. Scotland Yard doesn’t want her help, and Vail needs a success to get back in the good graces of her superiors. A cursory examination of the explosion site reveals the existence of a secret manuscript that could change the history of the written word forever. Then someone she knows and trusts appears to have become a traitor. Verdict – Vail is a terrific character, and throwing her into a foreign environment without her usual allies invigorates the plot and the series. Jacobson also knows how to throw in plot twists that are shocking but logical at the same time. Fans who have tired of James Patterson may enjoy discovering this author with this outstanding thriller.—Jeff Ayers, Seattle P.L. “Vail is a terrific character and…Jacobson knows how to throw in plot twists that are shocking but logical…(in) this outstanding thriller.” – Library Journal “Plot twists that are shocking but logical…Outstanding thriller.”– Library Journal “Outstanding thriller.”– Library Journal