The Missing Ones
Crime, Female Detectives, Mystery
Patricia Gibney
Lottie Parker, Book # 1
Bookouture
March 16th, 2017
ebook
424
English
February 19, 2019 February 22, 2019
When a woman’s body is discovered in a cathedral and hours later a young man is found hanging from a tree outside his home, Detective Lottie Parker is called in to lead the investigation. Both bodies have the same distinctive tattoo clumsily inscribed on their legs. It’s clear the pair are connected, but how?
The trail leads Lottie to St. Angela’s, a former children’s home, with a dark connection to her own family history. Suddenly the case just got personal.
As Lottie begins to link the current victims to unsolved murders decades old, two teenage boys go missing. She must close in on the killer before they strike again, but in doing so is she putting her own children in terrifying danger?
Lottie is about to come face to face with a twisted soul who has a very warped idea of justice.
1976: a small sack is buried, scared children look from the window.
2015: Susan Sallivan wants to know the truth, she goes to a church but she’s strangled with her iPod headphones.
Lottie Parker, homicide inspector of Ragmullin, a small Irish town 30 minuts away from Tullamore, is called upon the murder scene.
Who is Susan? She seems a woman without a past. Lottie questions Susan’s coworkers, among them James Brown. Who is found hanged close to his house. Suicide or homicide? and are the two cases connected? The coroner finds two similar tattoos on the bodies’ thigh. Something from their past killed them?
The book isn’t easy to read, it is clear since the beginning that the main plot is about pedophilia and pedofile priests. Moreover scene of abuse and torture are described in detail while minors are present. It isn’t a book for everyone and it can be a trigger for someone.
I don’t understand why Parker and her colleague, Sergeant Mark Boyd, keep fighting. I know that there was something between them, but I think they fight a little bit too much. Even if maybe it’s only a problem that I have and this behavior is fine between them (I need to read more books about them, maybe I will understand better).
Chapters are small and if you read my other book reviews you know that I love brief chapters. I read more than 100 pages in a few hours and I didn’t want to stop. Moreover my last day of reading this book, I read 150 pages in one sitting… First because the brief chapters I wanted to read more and second because I wanted to see if I was right about the killer.
I believe that Lottie made some big mistakes, for example when a witness tells her that a body is buried in that place (not telling you where) and she doesn’t check to see if it is true.
I love the book so so much even if I understood everything, but maybe the author wanted it that way, I mean she wanted us to understand everythiting but not the main character. Because Lottie has some personal problems that distract her. It was clear who was being buried at the beginning, it was clear who the kidnapper was and who was Brian (a kid from the institute where Susan and Jones were when young; the name was a clue in itself). In spit of this, I loved the plot and the story behind this book even if it was a fantasy plot (and so the name of the town Ragmullin) it is similar to real facts such as the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home of Tuam and Magdalene laundries mentioned in the book. And I documented myself about these facts (I knew about the second, not very much but at least I heard about it, but I didn’t know about the first). That the church is corrupted is evident and I am a Catholic so I am not against this only because it isn’t my belief, I’m not one of those that put their head under the sand only because it is something they believe in. If the facts say there is something bad in something I believe, I will say that’s true.
I believe that this is a series that needs to be read, as I said not everyone should read it or at least the first book, I can’t talk about the others since I still haven’t read them (they’re not even translated in Italian yet… Hope they will translate them chronologically – sometimes Italian translators and publishers really suck ergo the errors in the translated version that I read, big errors, too).
