The Girl In The Woods
Gregg Olsen
Pinnacle, Oct 28 2014, $9.99
ISBN: 9780786029945
In Port Orchard, Washington, on a nature hike in Banner Forest, an
Olally Elementary school sixth grader finds a human foot. Sheriff’s Detective Kendall Stark and Kitsap
County Forensic Pathologist Birdy Waterman look into what
happened that led to a severed body part.
The rest of the person is not found nearby and remains missing. Birdy believes an animal ripped the foot off
of a probably dead teenage girl.
Meanwhile
Birdy’s sixteen year old nephew Elan asks to stay with his aunt for a while as
he left his home after seeing his mom in his bed with her lover. At about the same time Elan came to Port
Orchard, Ted Roberts dies suspiciously with the pathologist thinking his wife
Jennifer poisoned him. Thus Birdy heads
to Arizona to exhume and test the body of Jennifer’s first husband for
poison. Extreme Hoarder Tess “The Mess”
Montgomery reports her high school daughter Darby missing to the Sheriff’s
Department; and soon afterward dirt biker and Afghanistan war veteran Marvin
Best finds a corpse with one foot missing in a garbage bag. Investigating Darby’s homicide, Stark and
Waterman follow clues leading to a fired prison guard and an extreme narcissist
serial killer convict with raging grudges towards Tess.
The first Waterman and Stark police procedural is a fabulous
investigative mystery with a three-dimensional cast involved in several
dysfunctional relationships (by far the most positive is the friendship and mutual
respect between the two investigators). Filled
with twists, especially an astonishing unexpected but plausible climatic spin,
readers will appreciate the detective and the pathologist working together on
two homicides.
Harriet Klausner
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