Patricia Gibney

A totally gripping thriller with a twist you won’t see coming

The Stolen Girls

Detective Lottie Parker is back again in another serial killer thriller as girl after girl goes missing just to turn up dead. Can she find the latest victims before it is too late? The young woman standing on Lottie's step was a stranger. She was clutching the hand of a young boy. "Help me," she said to Lottie. "Please help me." One Monday morning, the body of a young pregnant woman is found. The same day, a mother and her son visit the house of Detective Lottie Parker, begging for help to find a lost friend. Could this be the same girl? When a second victim is discovered by the same man, with the murder bearing all the same hallmarks as the first, Lottie needs to work fast to discover how else the two were linked. Then two more girls go missing. Detective Lottie Parker is a woman on the edge, haunted by her tragic past and struggling to keep her family together through difficult times. Can she fight her own demons and catch the killer before he claims another victim?

Izza

Ashley

Thank you to Grand Central Publishing and Hachette Book Group for this ARC of 'The Stolen Girls' by Patricia Gibney.

Detective Lottie Parker is feckin' exhausted.

This book covers the span of nine days and there isn't time to catch your breath through any of it. It's fast paced and filled with controversy and theories and drama that leaves the reader guessing until the last pages. Some of the clues I put together on my own. Other pieces of the puzzle did not click into place until the very end of the story. It was tragic and heartbreaking with a touch of hope at the end. 

This was my first experience with both Detecitve Lottie Parker and Patricia Gibney. One of my favorite things about most detective novels is that you can pick one up anywhere in the series and generally get by without any confusion. And Gibney does a good job of keeping the readers up with what they might need to know from previous installations that are relevant to this novel. 

I do think, however, that Gibney could have done without a perpetrator focusing on one of Parker's children, as I gathered from mentions throughout the novel that it's happened in the past with another of her kids. And while I understand the emotional pull that the author was going for, I think the story could have been just as solid and dramatic without that little aspect. That being said, I appreciated that the author didn't take the situation any further than she did with the child and the threat stalking her. (Vague, I know, but I'm trying to avoid spoilers.)

I felt for the women of this story. The lost and alone. The determined and scared. The Stolen Girls is a wonderfully written detective novel that never slowed down. It never lagged. I never found myself thinking "okay, but I don't care about this storyline," as I've found myself doing with other novels in the past. 

It was good. Enjoyable. Stressful in the way you want a detective novel to be stressful. I'm sure I'll be hunting down more of Gibney's novels sometime in the future.

The Stolen Girls A totally gripping thriller with a twist you won’t see coming

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