Monday, August 12, 2019

75. Vanishing Girls by Lisa Regan

#1 Detective Josie Quinn, Denton, PA cop
listened on Audible, also have on Kindle
read by Eilidh Beaton (do not listen to anything she reads again!)
Unabridged audio (11:40)
2018 Bookouture
334 pgs.
Adult Police Procedural/Murder Mystery
Finished 8/12/2019
Goodreads rating:  4.24 - 6246 ratings
My rating: 2
Setting: Contemporary Denton, PA

First line/s:  "There was a man in the woods, she was sure of it."

My comments:  OMG, I can't believe the audio company hired this particular reader for this particular book.  The almost 30-year-old rural PA protagonist sounded like an 18-year-old valley girl and mispronounced so many words that I really wondered what her background was (Scottish?).  It was unbelievably disconcerting and totally took away from the setting and this important primary character, making her almost laughable in places where she definitely should not have been!
     The story was fast paced, but the aforementioned discrepancy re: character and setting just threw the whole story itself off...
     Josie (who ends up becoming Denton's chief of police, yeah, right...) is impulsive, screwed up, on probation, and continues to work nonstop while her fiance lies near death in the the hospital, seemingly without much thought of him at all.  And the, bad guys start spilling their guts after keeping their mouth shut for years..... The combination of horrible narrator and implausible happenings make this one an eye roller.  It didn't give me any sense of rural Pennsylvania AT ALL.
     Here are some of her frustrating pronunciations (remember, this is supposedly in Pennsylvania!
          been = bean (do you know how many times people use this word?  LOTS!)
          ate = ett
          anything = ehn ih thinn
          taco = (pronouncing the a as in apple)
          everything = ev ra thinn
          hovered = haw - verd
          tel - uh - VIZH - un
          process:  proe-sess
          die-rector
          mo-bile
          temporary - temp-ree
          Maryland = merry-land!!!!!
          tousled = tousuhld
          protest = praw-test
          cemetery = sem eh tree

Goodreads synopsis:  She was close enough to see that the girl had written a word on the wall in bright, warm red blood. Not a word, actually. A name…
          Everyone in the small American town of Denton is searching for Isabelle Coleman, a missing seventeen-year-old girl. All they’ve found so far is her phone and another girl they didn’t even know was missing.
          Mute and completely unresponsive to the world around her, it’s clear this mysterious girl has been damaged beyond repair. All Detective Josie Quinn can get from her is a name: Ramona.
          Currently suspended from the force for misconduct, Josie takes matters into her own hands as the name leads her to evidence linking the two girls. She knows the race is on to find Isabelle alive, and she fears there may be others… 
          The trail leads Josie to another victim, a girl who escaped but whose case was labelled a hoax by authorities. To catch this monster, Josie must confront her own nightmares and follow her instinct to the darkest of places. But can she make it out alive?
          Fans of Angela Marsons, Helen Fields and Robert Dugoni will be utterly gripped and sleeping with the lights on once they discover the first in this unputdownable new crime thriller series.

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