Name: Pretty Little Things
ISBN: 9781593156077

Perseus

After 13-year-old Lainey Emerson disappears after a Friday night out with her friends, Special Agent Bobby Dees, who is still haunted by the unsolved disappearance of his own daughter, fears that she may be the victim of an online predator. By the internationally best-selling author of Retribution.

Pretty Little Things

Christina Baltimore 

This book was hard to read. It is about online predators and Lainey falls victim. The descriptions of characters, events and bodies in story are unnerving. 

Lainey is an overlooked 13 year old girl her mother and step-father are too busy to be too involved with her. She is a middle child. The family relocated and she is at a new school. She becomes friends with a boy online and thing begin to go down hill. She is Abducted and she is alone. Her disappearance does not get reported for 2 days. Many assume she is a runaway. Then comes Special Agent Bobby Dees. His life isn't perfect either. His daughter disappeared a year earlier and since then his marriage has failed. He realizes that the last person to have contact with Lainey was online. Lainey is the only one who had disappeared. Lots of kids that are not cared for and considered disposable have been taken too. Bobby Dees is desperately racing to find Lainey.

Hoffman does a great job pulling the reader into the story. The story explores the depths of online predators and it is a captivating read.

Laura

This book was fun to read, but not in a bad way. I have been looking for an actually good turn-your-brain-off crime novel author for a while now, and I think Jilliane Hoffman is a good choice. 

I'll be honest, I wasn't sure if I would like this book with the prologue. It took me a few chapters to get into it and realize that I was indeed enjoying myself. I took a backseat approach to this mystery, unique for me. Typically, I like to be a passenger seat driver to mystery novels, trying to figure out whodunnit right along side of the detectives. But in this book, I was fine with feeling like I was along for the ride, watching Bobby and Zo hunt down Picasso. That's not to say I didn't have a guess, but I wasn't that committed to it.

One of the things that I really liked was how even though we do have chapters from the killer's point of view, Hoffman took great care to never actually reveal who it was, and it even served to purposefully throw us off the trail of some suspects. I also felt like the villain's point of view was realistic. It didn't feel overdone bordering on cheesy and definitely unrealistic, like how the kidnapper's perspective felt in Hollie Overton's Baby Doll. I could believe someone could actually think like Picasso did. 

I also honestly liked all the characters, and actually rooted for Bobby and Zo (especially Zo, loved him), which is always unusual for me. I actually wanted Bobby to catch Picasso, to save his career and his daughter. I wanted Lainey to get rescued. And I liked how Hoffman wasn't afraid to kill off characters that we have grown to like in favor of the plot. And I loved the killer. He reminded me of the Gardener from The Butterfly Garden. In fact, this whole book reminded me of The Butterfly Garden and I loved it. Picasso was unnerving, but he was the perfect mix of cool and creepy to make a really awesome villain. 

Continue reading this review on my blog here: http://bookwormbasics.blogspot.com/20...

Pretty Little Things

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