4 stars out of 5
It's no different in this one; she and significant other, co-worker and Detective Sergeant Mark Boyd, are at least thinking about getting married. He shuffles between his own place and the fixer-upper home Lottie occupies with her school-age son Sean, daughter Katie and Katie's young daughter. It's a situation far from ideal - in fact, Lottie hates the place - but she's agreed to stay while her half-brother figures out what to do with it.
While work doesn't always provide the personal-life getaway she'd like - there are issues there as well - Lottie doesn't mind digging in, usually with gusto. This time, a woman walks in her daughter Isabel's house to babysit and gets a gut-wrenching surprise: her daughter's bloody body. The only saving grace is that the murderer spared the infant. Not long after Lottie and Mark are called in, another young mother, Joyce Breslin, goes missing; her four-year-old son follows suit, apparently abducted from his daycare center. Then, Joyce's body turns up as well - If that weren't enough, a female hiker unearths a tiny bone on a remote hillside - a bone, she's certain, is human.
All this leads the investigative team to consider numerous suspects, but mostly to dead ends. The discovery of a bloody razor blade solidifies Lottie's belief that the murders and abduction are related. Somehow, Lottie must connect all the dots before someone else, like Joyce's young son, becomes a victim as well.
All in all, this is another engrossing entry in the series that ends, as most of them do, with a cliffhanger that I expect will be resolved in the next installment. I look forward to that, and thank the publisher, via NetGalley, for allowing me to read and review a pre-release copy of this one. Well done!
Little Bones by Patricia Gibney (Bookouture, Septembeer 2021); 2290 KB)
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