I wouldn't say I loved this book, but I did like it well enough. (Too few books manage to hold my attention these days.)

The story fell just a little bit short of what I'd hoped for in terms of the final resolution of the central mystery....and I saw where it was headed far too many pages ahead of it actually getting there.

Still, it was mostly well written and original enough that I'd like to see what else Amanda Ward has written. ( )

This book has interesting characters and settings. The author did a masterful job of leading in you in one direction and then surprising you the reader with the opening of the next chapter. Yet it unfolds in a realistic manner. ( )

not worth going beyond sample-reading

I wouldn't say I loved this book, but I did like it well enough. (Too few books manage to hold my attention these days.)

The story fell just a little bit short of what I'd hoped for in terms of the final resolution of the central mystery....and I saw where it was headed far too many pages ahead of it actually getting there.

Still, it was mostly well written and original enough that I'd like to see what else Amanda Ward has written. ( )

(26) This was a quickly read novel about a family whose 5 year old daughter goes missing. We catch up to the family when the two other sisters are adults and their lives are damaged in predictable ways. Our protagonist, once a promising young pianist, is now a cocktail waitress in New Orleans. She returns home, age 30-something, for Christmas and events transpire to compel her to begin a search for her sister anew.

The novel is told in a series of flashbacks; which at first are pawned off as the daughter dreaming of the mother's young life - but then it just morphs into a second storyline told by a third person narrator, interspersed with a series of letters from a young woman writing to a strange man from a dating service. It all sounds mysterious, but actually, it was fairly easy to piece together and it seemed formulaic and predictable.

It was a quickly read airplane/beach read but not much beyond that. Old 'cold case' stories usually grab me, but this was just not particularly convincingly written. But entertaining and enjoyable in a light way despite the subject matter. ( )