Where the Lost Girls Go

December 12, 2016
Set in Sunrise Lake, Ore., this uneven series launch from Noonan (All She Ever Wanted as Rosalind Noonan) introduces rookie cop Laura Mori, who’s a bit of a fish out of water but eager to show what she can do. Mori becomes the lead officer in the case of an unidentified teenager killed in a fiery car wreck; the victim might be the missing 17-year-old daughter of Sunrise Lake’s most famous citizen, mystery writer Kent Jameson. In addition, Mori is at odds with the members of her traditional Japanese family, who don’t like her career choice. At 24, Mori has yet to move out of the family home. Meanwhile, her boss is on a mission to root out police corruption. And then there’s the deepening mystery of the lost girls of the title, runaway teens who go to Portland and subsequently disappear. Noonan tries to cover too many issues in a story whose multiple viewpoints don’t cohere until halfway through the book.

December 15, 2016
Officer Laura Mori's first case uncovers something sinister lurking in the bucolic woods of Oregon. Fresh from the academy, Laura is dispatched to what at first appears to be a straightforward DUI. The wrecked vintage sports car belongs to local author, celebrity, and benefactor Kent Jameson, and the driver appears to be his missing, troubled teen daughter, Lucy. But this case is definitely a homicide: the car's brakes were deliberately cut. As forensics works to identify the body, Noonan (Domestic Secrets, 2015, etc., as Rosalind Noonan) intersperses the disappointed expectations of Laura's Japanese-American parents and her unrequited crush on the boy next door with generic evil soliloquies by the serial killer. The diary in Lucy's room indicates she was in a relationship with an older man she called A, perhaps A as in Andy Greenleaf, the handsome ranch hand on the Jameson estate. It turns out the victim of that anything-but-accidental accident was not Lucy but an orphaned runaway who was drugged. Lucy, meanwhile, is living with a band of runaways in the forest led by a charismatic survivalist they call the Prince. Is this a murderous cult? Or is something else waiting in the dark shadows of the trees? Ham-fisted--in both the pointedly ethnic characterizations and the clearly obvious identity of the murderer--and eminently forgettable.

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