Vanishing Girls by Lisa Regan @Lisalregan @bookouture #bookreview #thriller

Title: Vanishing Girls

Author: Lisa Regan

Publisher: Bookouture

Publication Date: January 17, 2018

Page Count: 334

My rating: 4 stars

About the book:

The little girl curled into a tiny ball as the chamber grew colder around her. “Please,” she whispered, rocking back and forth. “I want to go home.”

When Isabelle Coleman, a blonde, beautiful young girl goes missing, everyone from the small town of Denton joins the search. They can find no trace of the town’s darling, but Detective Josie Quinn finds another girl they didn’t even know was missing.

Mute and unresponsive, it’s clear this mysterious girl has been damaged beyond repair. All Josie can get from her is the name of a third girl and a flash of a neon tongue piercing that matches Isabelle’s.

The race is on to find Isabelle alive, and Josie fears there may be other girls in terrible danger. When the trail leads her to a cold case labelled a hoax by authorities, Josie begins to wonder is there anyone left she can trust?

Someone in this close-knit town is committing unspeakable crimes. Can Josie catch the killer before another victim loses their life?

Utterly gripping crime for readers who adored Angela Marsons, Helen Fields and Robert Dugoni. You will be sleeping with the lights on once you discover the first in this unputdownable new crime thriller series.

My review:

Vanishing Girls by Lisa Regan is the first book in the new crime thriller Detective Josie Quinn series. The lead character Josie is a police detective that is on the outs and suspended when a huge case is going on and is not the type to sit on the sidelines waiting for the call to come back to work.

From the opening chapter the action takes off as Josie finds a simple stop turning into a life and death situation as bullets begin to fly. This leads Josie to despite her suspension decide to start investigating the case of Isabelle disappearance when it looks like it may have something to do with Josie’s run in that morning.

This series is not quite the normal police procedural crime thriller since the main character is not actively a detective being under suspension. What we get instead is a gritty and determined character who goes rogue in her own investigating and always seems to find herself involved in the case.

It took me a little while to warm up to Josie since it wasn’t immediately apparent why she wasn’t on active duty. Once getting to know her though I really did warm up to her determination and strength that she showed all throughout the book. Josie is certainly one tough cookie and after finishing this first book I’ll be interested to see where her story goes in the future.

I received an advance copy from the publisher via NetGalley.

Find this book online: 

Goodreads  /   Amazon

About the author:

Lisa Regan was born in Philadelphia, a product of two large Irish Catholic families whose roots run deep in her neighborhood. From the moment she was able to put words onto the page, she was writing: poems, stories, and even novels. At age eleven, her parents bought her a typewriter, on which she wrote her first full-length novel. By the time she was eighteen, she had written four terrible young adult novels. Between eighteen and twenty-two, she had a crisis of confidence and although she kept writing, she was unable to finish any novel-length projects. She spent her time working in bookstores while completing college. She spent two years at the Community College of Philadelphia before transferring to Bloomsburg University, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in English and a master of education degree. To make ends meet, she worked as both a certified nurse assistant and a karate instructor. In 2002 she finally finished her first adult novel, which remains on a flash drive in her nightstand. In 2006, she finished what would become her first published novel: Finding Claire Fletcher. After being passed over by more than 150 agents and then more than a dozen publishers, her first novel was published in December 2012, followed by her second novel, Aberration, in June 2013. Finding Claire Fletcher won Best Heroine and was runner-up for Best Novel in the 2013 eFestival of Words Best of the Independent eBook Awards. It was a finalist for the Kindle Book Review’s Best Kindle Book Awards in 2014. In December 2013, the novel reached number one on Amazon’s Bestselling Kidnapping Crime Fiction list; in the same month, her second novel, Aberration reached number one on Amazon’s Serial Killer Crime Fiction Bestseller list. Lisa currently resides in Philadelphia with her husband and daughter where she works full time and works on her future novels while waiting in line at the local post office.