The Girl Who Was Taken

The Girl Who Was Taken is Charlie Donlea’s second novel of the 11 that are currently listed in my Google search, and it is his first novel reviewed in this blog, but I’ll guarantee it won’t be the last one. I continue to find it exciting to find a good mystery novelist and find that the author already has created a significant volume of work. The author was suggested to me by one of my daughters who said Donlea was quickly becoming her favorite author in this genre. She had read several of his books already, but none of those were available in audiobook format on Libby, so I “settled” on this one. It was fantastic, and after reading one book, I plan to look for more.

Megan McDonald had just graduated from high school when she was kidnapped. She was also a star athlete and was on her way to a scholarship ride at Duke. But, she disappeared from a high school celebration party, and her story hit the headlines nationwide. Missing the same night, was a lifelong friend of Megan’s, Nicole Cutty. Hardly the student-athlete that Megan had been, Nicole had only scratched her way through high school while she looked for good times, not her own future. Nicole had a very dark side to her character. It was Megan’s story that stayed in the press, especially after she escaped from her captivity after 13 days. A year later, with the help of a ghost writer and pressure from her mom to complete the task, Megan published a book of her ordeal which immediately became a best seller. She was seen as a hero, was in demand on the talk show circuit, was known to be a woman who escaped her captor (who had never been caught), one who had emotionally healed from the ordeal – facts which Megan eventually revealed were untrue. But other girls had also gone missing and it seemed a serial killer was at work.

 

Meanwhile, Nicole’s older sister Livia had graduated from medical school and was completing a fellowship program in pathology. She was guilt ridden because she had not taken a call from the always troubled Nicole on the night of her disappearance. Livia contacted Megan to pick her brain about the details of what had happened to her, details which never appeared in her book.

 

Donlea’s characters were quite believable, and it sounded as if the characters in his book were sincerely emotionally traumatized by their ordeals. The plot kept me riveted to the book. Donlea skillfully jumped back and forth between prior times when Megan was a little girl, when she was in school, when she was an athlete, and the present as success in the unraveling of the killer’s identity came closer to being discovered. This was an excellent suspense and murder mystery, cleverly written, and it gets my very strong recommendation. There will be more Donlea in my life.