Tuesday, June 23, 2015

Ant Dens by Mary Coley

Rebecca Aldrich has run away from home before, but she's never gone long.  This time she was getting ready to go to college and she disappears from campus.  The cops think she's run off with her boyfriend.  Jamie gets involved because it's her stepdaughter and she can help her Spanish speaking mother talk to the police.  She's also worried about Rebecca and will get even more worried as time goes on.

The author kindly sent me a copy of this book for review (thank you).  It's been published so you can grab a copy now.

Having your dead husband's ex-wife in the same household is not comfortable but Maria can't stay in a motel because her husband would assume she came to meet a man.  Her home life sounds like it's pretty stressful.

Jamie finds out that women have gone missing from around the local area several times.  Her best friend, who is a journalist, thinks it is human trafficking: that they are selling the young girls into slave trade or prostitution.  What makes matters worse is that when she cleans out her husband's office at the university, she finds a file filled with missing persons reports going back twenty years.  They are all female.  Did Ben have something to do with this?  She knows he has some secret he hid from her because she found a note in his journal that said he couldn't tell because it would destroy their lives.  What was that secret?

Jamie is an interesting character.  She wants the truth and will pay the price to learn it.  She has her ex-husband hanging around, Maria living with her, the nosy neighbor hanging around and she's worrying about how much she misses Ben and still loves him but she loves Sam, too.  Maybe she's entering a relationship too soon?

As in the previous book, it all goes back to the past.  Something happened at the college while her husband was going to school there.  There's another family involved.  And these family secrets are deadly...

Ms. Coley researches the area she's writing about and teaches about the land as well as writes a good mystery.  I like her style.

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