I’ve read stuff before by Lisa Unger, but it didn’t click until I saw the main character name. Lydia Strong, strong woman extraordinaire. Fresh from a tour promoting her last case, reclusive true crime writer Lydia Strong receives an anonymous cry for help, begging her to find and protect Tatiana Quinn, “and all the other girls in need of rescue.” Maybe the plea strikes close to her heart; maybe her investigator’s intuition starts buzzing. She takes it on.

Other Books: Angel Fire, Beautiful Lies

Lydia had become an icon of hope, it seemed, for the world’s most desperate and its most sick and twisted.

This book is a snoozefest. Super strong woman, super strong case featuring women trafficking. A disappearance.

Well, a fifteen-year-old rich girl disappears. There’s a flurry of media coverage; the parents offer a million-dollar reward for her return; weeks go by and attention peters out. Another little girl lost to the street, another statistic. Not really that out of the ordinary, except for the million. But then there’s this tape, which is not mentioned anywhere. It’s a big lead in an investigation that certainly shouldn’t have been closed yet, especially when the parents are rich, prominent people.

The story had potential if only the heroine wasn’t such a know-it-all. So perfect in any way. So put together.

Jeffrey had coined the term the buzz, inventing a word for Lydia’s unique ability to perceive what others did not—her ability to know when something was wrong, or not what it seemed, or needed investigating. Sometimes the truth left only a footprint in the sand, a scent on the wind. And Lydia had an uncanny ability to detect the most fleeting clues. Listening to the girl’s voice on the tape, she’d felt it. She got a lot of crazy mail, a lot of false leads, a lot of desperate pleas. But listening to that tape, she’d heard the unmistakable pitch of fear, of need. A year ago, she would already have been researching. She’d have been on the Internet, looking for articles on a missing girl named Tatiana Quinn in Miami. But instead, she was now immersing herself in the happiness of being home with Jeffrey. In their friendship, they’d been apart more than they’d been together. They met when she was just fifteen years old. At that time, he was an FBI agent working a serial-murder case; her mother was the thirteenth victim of the killer he hunted, Jed McIntyre. There had been a bond between Lydia and Jeffrey
since the first night they met, a bond that had grown stronger over the years.

This feels like it was written by a 10 year old attempting fiction for the first time. I started going a bit faster through the pages, trying to hold my dislike at bay as I read on. The plot is also paper thin having brought in the Albanian mafia and people smuggling.

Loose estimates suggested that there were about thirty thousand Albanian prostitutes in Europe alone, nearly 1 percent of the entire population of Albania. The girls became, for all intents and purposes, sex slaves…trapped, hopeless. Unable to escape, but even if they managed to, they could never go home again. A woman who had been raped in Albania would be murdered by her father and brothers, blamed for the violence perpetrated against her. They were lost women, invisible to the world.

Oh no. Let’s continue.

Bleak book, one-sided characters, a lackluster romance. 1/5 from me.