Thread of Suspicion

Thread of Suspicion is the second of a six-book series by the rather prolific crime writer, Jeff Shelby. The first book, Thread of Fear, was a well-written story that had a cliff-hanging ending (see my review). I was already invested in Shelby’s characters, so of course I jumped right into this book which did not leave me disappointed, except for another ending that led me to the third book. Joe Tyler was a cop in Coronado, an island that is just a bridge away from San Diego. His 8-year-old daughter had been kidnapped right out of his front yard. He no longer could work as a cop and his marriage came undone as he spent the next eight years searching for his lost Elizabeth. At the end of the first book, as he solved other cases of missing children, he got his first credible evidence that his daughter was alive and living in Minneapolis.

As Joe tried to learn his way around the world of runaway teens in Minneapolis, he encountered Isabel Balzone, a woman who had dedicated herself to helping these teens. She didn’t ask anything of them and just provided them with food, blankets, and other things they needed to survive on the streets. Joe and Isabel were able to help each other, but Joe did not even have his daughter’s current name and address, only an outdated picture of Elizabeth with a friend, a picture that had been taken in Minneapolis. Then he found the friend, and then he figured out a name for Elizabeth (Ellie Corzine), and then her home address. But by the time he got to her home, she had just had a row with her “foster parents” and she had runaway only three days earlier. So the chase was on once again.

Certain of the reality of the chase for Elizabeth this time, unlike so many of the phantom chases he had been on for the last eight years, Joe called his ex-wife Lauren to come to Minneapolis to help. She still lived in Coronado in the house where the kidnapping had occurred.

Joe still needed more info, and in order to get it, he agreed to help find the missing son of a dying mob boss, a son who wanted nothing to do with his father. Shelby did a great job intertwining these plots (and more) along with stories of other missing kids. By the end of the book, Joe had begun to suspect that somebody at the Coronado Police Department, people who he had always leaned on for the last eight years to get strands of information about possible sightings of Elizabeth, might have actually been involved in her disappearance. He had never gotten along with Lt. Bazer who had eventually forced Joe out of the department, but what about Mike Lorenzo, Joe’s former mentor who had always seemed to be nearly as desperate to locate Elizabeth (Ellie) as Joe was.

The cliff-hanging ending to this story had multiple unfinished story lines, and I’m not quitting here – I already have the next book, Thread of Betrayal.