Title: Never Let Go
Author: Lori Duffy Foster
Publisher: Level Best Books
Pages: 271
My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
Carla Murphy and Rachel have been best friends since they were ten years of age. But now Carla barely remembers this Rachel, in whose basement she has been trapped. She remembers coming over to Rachel’s house with her six-month-old baby Christopher for lunch, but now there’s no sign of Christopher. What’s worse, Carla’s husband, Nick, thinks she has taken off with the baby.
Rachel tells her that she has been planning this since she got to know of Carla’s pregnancy, and she has no intention of letting her leave.
If Rachel doesn't have her way with Nick, she will kill both Nick and Carla. Carla will have to help Rachel seduce her own husband in order to keep herself and her husband alive.
Meanwhile, Sawyer Hamill, police chief, comes to know that a body of a young teen, Leland Boise, presumably killed 15 years ago, has been found. He wonders if Carla fled because she had something to do with it.
Will Carla get out of the basement alive? Will she ever find her way to her husband and son? Or will Rachel succeed in her aim of getting into a relationship with Nick? Will Nick get over Carla? Or will he keep looking for her?
The book is writen in the 3rd person limited past tense PoV. The plot advances through three perspectives, that of Carla, Nick and Sawyer.
At first, it’s not clear how the Boise case might be linked with that of Carla and Christopher. In the end, the two mysteries don’t get resolved concurrently, I had expected them to be related somehow, but it wasn’t so.
Once one mystery was resolved, the book became more character driven, and the second mystery was put on the back burner. A cold case getting colder.
The book was well written, and the action paced well. I felt invested in the characters. Once there was a breakthrough in the first mystery, I thought the excitement generated would peter out. But it actually went up a few notches.
While I liked the action scenes and the emotions they drew out, there wasn’t much in terms of the investigation. In the end, both cases, though unrelated, were solved on the basis of the same type of clue.
Carla was a stronger character than Nick, who had precious little to do. He was more reactive than proactive.
There were a lot of grammatical issues. The author used allude instead of elude, and allusion instead of illusion.
The end was unexpected. It made me feel a little sad that justice isn’t always meted out the way we’d like it to be.
(I read this book on NetGalley. Thank you to the author, the publisher and NetGalley.)
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