Right Behind You

Starred review from November 28, 2016
Bestseller Gardner’s edge-of-your-seat thriller brings back law-enforcement couple Pierce Quincy and Rainie Conner, last seen in 2008’s Say Goodbye. Quincy, a retired FBI agent, and Conner, an investigative consultant for the Bakersville County (Ore.) sheriff’s department, have been fostering 13-year-old Sharlah for three years and want to adopt her. When Sharlah was five, her father fatally stabbed her mother in a drunken rage. In self-defense, her nine-year-old brother, Telly, beat their father to death with a baseball bat. In the tragedy’s aftermath, the siblings were separately fostered. Now a security camera catches 17-year-old Telly shooting a clerk and a customer to death in a gas station. Telly’s foster parents are later found slain in their home. While Quincy and Conner work on protecting Sharlah and locating Telly, Sharlah makes plans of her own. Revealing chapters from the children’s point of view show them trying to match wits with adults. Devilishly clever twists propel Gardner’s tale of family bonds fractured, mended, and sometimes destroyed. Five-city author tour. Agent: Meg Ruley, Jane Rotrosen Agency.

February 1, 2017
A teenager with a troubled past becomes the prime suspect in a string of brutal murders, but ex-FBI profiler Pierce Quincy and his partner, Rainie Conner, think there's more to the story.For the past three years, Pierce and Rainie have fostered Sharlah Nash, now 13, with the hope of soon adopting her. Sharlah's childhood is the epitome of troubled: when she was 5, her drug-addict father killed her mother and then tried to kill her and her older brother, Telly, but Telly, then 9, bashed his head in with a baseball bat. The siblings were fostered apart, with Sharlah ending up with Pierce and Rainie, whose expertise as parents seems to come from their combined resumes as a former criminal profiler and cop, respectively. Telly, we learn in expansive flashbacks from the now-teenager's point of view (Sharlah has her own, crowding an already packed narrative), bounced around before landing, age 17, with Frank and Sandra Duvall, a kind couple who are obviously not what they seem. In what appears to be an explosion of unexplained rage, Telly allegedly murders the Duvalls and then kills two people in a gas station before heading off into the Oregon woods, sparking a manhunt and fears that he's coming after Sharlah. Pierce and Rainie (last seen in Say Goodbye, 2008) work with local law enforcement to build a psychological profile of the teen--which is questionable given the excessive amount of guesswork and second- and thirdhand information used--while trying to protect their daughter from harm. With its shaky armchair psychology and excessive plot threads, this is a series low point.

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