The Girl Who Was Taken by Charlie Donlea

The Girl Who Was Taken by Charlie Donlea
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In the small town of Emerson Bay, North Carolina tragedy hits hard one summer night when two high school senior girls, Nicole Cutty and Megan McDonald, disappear from a beach party. After two weeks Megan escapes from a bunker hidden deep in the woods and manages to flag down help but after being rescued she gets asked one question, what happened to Nicole and Megan just doesn’t have the answer.

A year later Megan on the surface seems to be recovering from her ordeal becoming a best selling author with a book about what had happened to her during her kidnapping. With Nicole still missing her older sister Livia is training to be a forensic pathologist to be able to get answers for others and maybe help heal from the loss of her sister.

When another body shows up in Livia’s lab she finds herself being tossed back into the middle of her sister’s case when it turns out that the man was connected to Nicole’s past. During the investigation Livia reaches out to Megan hoping the girl can finally help bring answers to what had happened to Nicole that fateful night.

I will admit for me The Girl Who Was Taken had a somewhat slow start to it as I tried to decipher exactly what was going on with Megan and Nicole. It seems at the start of the book that Nicole had escaped that night and Megan taken but then Megan turns up and Nicole never had…. confusing? A bit. With jumping ahead in time and switching the point of view here and there the book took a while for me to settle in and get truly invested in the story but I was quite glad I stuck with it in the end.

Now as for the story and answers to what happened that night overall with the girls I actually found that I enjoyed the outcome to the book quite a bit. One of those twists and turns and intricate plots that took a while to uncover but when I got there I was quite satisfied that my random guesses throughout the book were no where near the mark and it was definitely a page turner once it got going for me.

I received an advance copy from the publisher via NetGalley.