Little Girls Sleeping
Crime, Female Detectives, Mystery
Jennifer Chase
Katie Scott, Book # 1
Bookouture
May 31, 2019
ebook from NetGalley
284
English
May 20, 2019 May 27, 2019
He looked down at the little girl, sleeping peacefully, her arms wrapped around a teddy bear. He knew he was the only one who could save her. He could let her sleep forever.
An eight-year-old girl, Chelsea Compton, is missing in Pine Valley, California and for Detective Katie Scott it’s a cruel reminder of the friend who disappeared from summer camp twenty years ago. Unable to shake the memories, Katie vows she won’t rest until she discovers what happened to Chelsea.
But as Katie starts to investigate, the case reveals itself to be much bigger and more shocking than she feared. Hidden deep in the forest she unearths a makeshift cemetery: a row of graves, each with a brightly coloured teddy bear.
Katie links the graves to a stack of missing-persons cases involving young girls—finding a pattern no one else has managed to see. Someone in Pine Valley has been taking the town’s daughters for years, and Katie is the only one who can stop them.
And then another little girl goes missing, snatched from the park near her home.
Katie’s still haunted by the friend she failed to protect, and she’ll do anything to stop the killer striking again—but can she find the little girl before it’s too late?
About the book
I would like to thank NetGalley and the author for my ARC in exchange for an honest review.
This is the first book of the new series by Jennifer Chase, a new author for me, dedicated to Detective Katie Scott. Katie has just returned from the war and her uncle, very fond of her, is at the airport to take her home. At home waiting for her there is a surprise, her faithful dog Cisco who saved her life in the war. Now both “retired” from the army, Katie must understand what she wants to do with her life. In the past, she was a police officer in Sacramento so her uncle, who is the sheriff of the city where she lives (Pine Valley in California), asks her to help them at the station. It’s here that Katie learns about the case of little Chelsea Compton, who disappeared four years ago.
Clashing with the appointed detective, Katie believes that the investigation made by the detective is superficial and with stubbornness manages to find the corpse. But with Chelsea’s body there’s another girl.
I really liked the book, I liked the author’s style and also the fact that some chapters were written from the murderer’s point of view. I liked that it led us to believe that the culprit was a certain person but that wasn’t the case (okay, of course I realized that it wasn’t him since I read so many books of this genre and it is never like that, but I liked it anyway, oh how I am cryptic today).
I liked the short chapters and I was’t tired of reading it, apart from the end, but this is my personal taste because searches for missing people don’t attract me that much, but if I had more time, I would have read this book in a flash seeing how it flows and not a week. I was so disappointed when I had to put it down because of life.
Obviously I didn’t like the original case detective and I was happy for what happened to him and I must say that as soon as I read that he was so against the protagonist, I was afraid of how the story was going to end. Often if the protagonist of the book is discredited, or someone is against him/her I turn up my nose, because I don’t like this cliché but I must say that it was very well written here, moreover I liked that Katie kept up with her investigation, even though that detective was her uncle’s ex-colleague.
I’m not an animal lover; in fact, when I was a child, dogs frightened me (thanks to my aunt’s neighbors who lived on a fairly busy and large street with an open courtyard and no gates, who left the dog wondering around so when he started barking at me and coming towards me, because I was so scared, I almost ended under a car with my bike… yes from the fright I crossed the road to run away from him… my mom almost had an heart attack – I was 6 for God’s sake! -. We should have reported them, but we didn’t do anything and at that moment we didn’t think about it. And the dog is innocent, don’t get me wrong, I know that; the owners are at fault here). What was I saying? Ah yes, I don’t like animals very much but I loved Cisco (also because it’s not physically here but only written on the page) and I hope to find him again in the next books.
I’ve never read anything from this author, but I saw that she has another series and maybe I will read it (if it’s translated in Italian…)
