My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Earlier, when one reads a detective novel, there were parts in the story that kind of feels like ‘suspension of disbelief’ Like a simple thought, huh, does that really happen? But now-a days as the authors are going into such detail into their work that it doesn’t feel like fiction at all. Lissa Marie Redmond has the added advantage that she’s a retired cold-case detective with superb writing skills that her books have that innate quality of UNPUTDOWNABLE.
Three girls have gone missing after a party. Their phones have been left behind and no clues have been found. The Secrets They Left Behind has Shea Anderson as a detective who goes undercover into a college campus to find the truth of the missing girls. Shea is already suffering from trauma of a previous undercover operation that has her reeling from nightmares. But she agrees to help the FBI to capture the offender and provide some sort of answers to the family and friends.
The story also gives us a glimpse of the effect of undercover operations on individuals, how much their psyche gets affected acting and playing and living a lie. It is these short glimpses of how much struggle and sacrifice goes into nabbing a murderer that makes this one a solid thriller.
Many thanks to Lissa Marie Redmond, Crooked Lane Books and Net Galley for a chance to review this book.
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Three missing girls, no leads, a vault of dark secrets, and a case that’s getting chillier by the minute, set the stage for this nail-biting procedural from former cold case homicide detective and acclaimed author Lissa Marie Redmond.
Three college freshmen go missing from their rural hometown of Kelly’s Falls while on Christmas break. Their cell phones, coats, and purses are left behind, but the girls have disappeared without a trace. As the days turn into weeks and the investigation grows cold, twenty-three year old Buffalo police officer Shea O’Connor is called on to dig up leads undercover.
Still bearing the emotional and physical scars of a previous case, O’Connor infiltrates as eighteen-year-old Shea Anderson, a college freshman and the “niece” of the town’s police chief. As she begins to immerse herself in the missing girls’ world, befriending their friends and family, and doing whatever it takes to maintain her cover, O’Connor realizes the track is far colder than she initially thought. But whoever was behind the girls’ disappearance was only warming up, and they have set their crosshairs directly on her.
The heat is on for O’Connor as she closes in on the shocking truth about what really happened the night the girls vanished.