The Girls She Left Behind: A Novel (Lizzie Snow)
By: Sarah Graves
Rating: 5 of 5
I was able to dive right into the action of “The Girls She Left Behind” without having read the first book in the series. I enjoyed the book well enough that I will certainly go back and read the first novel as it will undoubtedly fill in a lot of the background information on the characters. While that would be nice to have read, it wasn’t necessary for the action of the mystery in this book.
Lizzie Snow is a big city cop who has moved to a small town in Maine in hopes of finding her young niece, who was abducted years before in the same crime that left her motherless. There is a continued element in this story where Lizzie has her hopes raised and dashed or fears raised and relieved with regards to her niece.
The story itself is about a man who has abducted young women off the streets of his city and keeps them in his basement for years. A decade ago, this would have seemed implausible but in recent years, we have seen a number of these types of incidents. In this story, a young woman has escaped years before but keeps quiet about what happened to her as she is concerned about becoming a victim of the police and the press because of the crimes against her. Unfortunately, her keeping quiet also means that the other young women, including her own cousin, are still trapped.
Because of her guilt, she looks for a way to keep her culpability a secret. This leads her and others into a wild chase that reaches across state boundaries and touches the lives of many other individuals.
I enjoyed the book as a mystery and as a police procedural. While you immediately know who is guilty of certain crimes the story around those crimes is something that unfolds as you get deeper and deeper into the book. At certain points, I was sure that I had solved the mysteries only to find that I was chasing down a lead that didn’t pan out. The story had a well-thought out ending and still left itself open for a follow-on book. I will be sure to looking for that book when it is published.
I received a digital ARC copy of this book from the publisher, Bantam, via Netgalley.
