Laurie is a dispatcher with the San Bernal PD. She is working one night and gets a call from her daughter, JoJo, and knows that her daughter is in dire trouble. Laurie immediately gets to work to try to find her daughter, involving her husband, who is the chief of police.
When they get to the scene, JoJo has been raped and there is a murder victim found in the bathroom. Kevin, a pro football player, is at the scene (in his own home) and is arrested for both crimes.
There is a person missing, though. That is Harper, JoJo's best friend. This becomes a search for that missing girl.

This is not usually my type of genre, but there were many twists and turns to the story that made it
quite interesting. ( )

While Stolen Things starts off with a crazy bang, I found myself quickly brought down by some of the author’s seemingly personal views on certain topics. Obviously there’s going to be a bit of a writer’s feelings and opinions in anything they write, but this felt just a tad too much.
Regardless, the story itself held my attention for the most part. ( )

Bland. Writing does not live up to the promise of the interesting plot. Skip this one. ( )

Bland. Writing does not live up to the promise of the interesting plot. Skip this one. ( )

Stolen Things by R. H. Herron is an interesting take on a parents’ worst fear - a physically traumatized daughter and her missing best friend. In this case, the parent in question is Laurie Ahmadi, a police dispatcher with the same agency her husband serves as Police Chief. When their daughter wakes up after being drugged with no memory how she got there or exactly what happened to her, and her best friend has disappeared, the Ahmadi family springs into action, desperate to solve the case.

The characters in this book are very well-written and you come to care deeply for them through the course of the book. There are some twists and turns, and at time, you truly don’t know who you can believe and who is lying. My biggest issue with the book as a whole was trying to suspend disbelief to lose myself in the story. As a former dispatcher, I feel like I know too much about the job to read with anything less than brutal scrutiny, and there were many times I found myself rolling my eyes and huffing in annoyance at Laurie.

I do think that for anyone without that background, or less picky than I am, would enjoy this book. It really is good; just not the book for me.

I received a free e-copy of Stolen Things from NetGalley and Dutton in exchange for my review. ( )