Long Time Gone

 My binging of Charlie Donlea’s novels might be over, at least regarding those in audio format I think I've now been through them all. If you’ve been following my book reviews, you know that I’ve found his plots and characters to be excellent. If read one after the other in the course of less than two months. In this one, Long Time Gone, there was excellent development of his protagonist, Sloan Hastings, a physician who is completing her fellowship in forensic pathology. When she submits her own DNA to a popular genetic tracing service, her own family of origin came back as a total surprise. Sloan knew she had been adopted, but she learned she had been the victim of an unsolved kidnapping 30 years earlier, a national news sensation.

I thought this was an excellent story and I was about to recommend it to my daughter. After an exciting plot, the final story hung on one ridiculous detail that was beyond the realm of believability. While readers in this genre must be willing to suspend reality to a degree, there are limits to that. For the first time, Donlea went beyond the border of believability, and it sure spoiled a good book. So, I was entertained until the very end. I am disappointed. Maybe you’ll have a different reaction.

The Suicide House

 I’ve continued my binge reading and listening to murder mysteries by Charlie Donlea. There may be only two books left that are available in audio format. My last read was The Suicide House, a story that takes place at a successful high school college prep boarding program. The campus is large and beautiful, and the teachers also lived on campus in a building that provided them with privacy from the students. However, when a train track was built to support a local mining operation, the teachers’ house became undesirable due to the constant noise. But when that structure was abandoned, it became the favorite place for students to use when they wanted to get away from the very strict rules that were a part of their academic program. Party on!

 

But then there was a series of deaths in the old teachers’ house and on the nearby railroad tracks. In the second book in the Rory Moore/Lane Phillips, Donlea further developed those characters. It was Rory who had a unique expertise in recreating murder scenes from cold case unsolved crimes. Lane was the one person in the world who understood this obsessional and autistic woman. His support allowed her to do her thing. She simply saw clues that others had missed.

 

This is a good plot and I appreciated learning more about the protagonists. Perhaps this book is not great literature, but it is captivating none-the-less. If this is your genre, you should get to know Charlie Donlea.

Don't Believe It

 My binge of Charlie Donlea’s books continues. Don’t Believe It is a story about whether Grace Sebold murdered her boyfriend, Julian, while on a Spring Break from their fourth year of medical school. They’ve traveled to St. Lucia with a group of close friends since high school for the purpose of being at the wedding for two of them. It’s Julian’s plan to propose marriage to Grace, and Julian chose the most romantic spot, high on a cliff overlooking a beautiful white sandy beach and the Caribbean. Julian’s body was subsequently discovered in the water and he had obviously fallen from the cliff. Grace was accused of having pushed him off, and there was significant physical evidence that tied her to the crime 

Although Grace constantly protested her innocence, claiming that she had not even gone to the planned rendezvous with Julian, her statements were not deemed to be credible. She was provided with local council who was thought to be inadequate to the task, and Grace was convicted of murder. She had been in jail for 10 years when filmmaker Sydney Ryan chose to focus on this case for a television series. She discovered some inconsistencies in the original investigation. The St. Lucia Department of Justice was uninterested in reopening the case for fear that it would hurt their vital tourism business, and the U.S. Department of Justice was uninterested in looking bad because it meant they had ignored a U.S. citizen who needed their help. In the face of danger to herself, Sydney was determined to carry through with her investigative efforts despite the resistance she faced..

 

The plot was exceptionally well written, and I did not see the last-minute shifts in the story until they actually occurred. This is another good and entertaining murder mystery novel from Donlea. I have become a fan, and my binge reading/listening to his stories will continue.

Some Choose Darkness

 Some Choose Darkness is the fifth Charlie Donlea novel I’ve read/listened to in a very short time span. His books are available on Libby and the wait for them has not been too long. He typically writes about psychologically damaged women, both the people hunting for clues about an old murder as well as those who have been the victims. The subtitle of the book is A Rory Moore/Lane Phillips Novel, Rory being the protagonist in this good story. She specializes in forensic reconstruction of cold cases, finding clues that others have missed.

 

In this story, her father was an attorney of a client he had taken on early in his career, a serial killer who was convicted and imprisoned for only one of the women he had been suspected of killing. Rory’s father, she discovered to her own horror, had continued his relationship with “The Thief” and had taken on responsibilities that were far beyond a typical attorney-client relationship, including managing his wealth and then paying himself for services rendered from that fund. Her father was terrified that although The Thief had never been paroled, he was coming to the end of his 30-year prison sentence and was about to be released. His anxiety increased until he had a heart attack and died.

 

Rory had graduated from law school and was listed as being on her father’s staff, she had never practiced law. Rather, she had quietly left that scene and limited her legal work to reconstructing crimes. However, as she studied the victims of old crimes, she became emotionally disturbed by the effort. At the start of this story, the emotionally fragile Rory had just returned from 6 months off work as the result of the trauma she felt by the nature of her work. She was not prepared to take on her father’s cases, and given the short timeline to the prisoner’s impending release, something her father had successfully stalled for some years, the judge would not allow Rory to refer the case to some other attorney.

 

The case that had led to this man’s incarceration had to do with the disappearance of Angela Mitchell, another presumed victim of this killer. It was Rory’s reconstruction of that crime that moved this story line along. Angela’s body had never been found, and Rory began to wonder if she might not still be alive.

 

I have been entertained by this series of books by Donlea, and I’m already nearing the end of another one of his books. You should expect that I’m giving this author a strong recommendation.

Twenty Years Later

 Twenty Years Later is the fourth Charlie Donlea novel I’ve read recently, three this month alone. Perhaps, this is his best, and it would be hard to beat The Girl Who Was Taken. I listened to this one in audiobook format which I enjoy on my daily dog walks. The story begins with a recently arrived tv host on a news program called American Events. Like 60 Minutes and Dateline, it is more like a weekly magazine approach than a nightly news segment. In the last couple years, Avery Mason has worked her way up to being a co-host with the long-time very popular male host. When he died unexpectly, Avery was thrust into the job as a temporary host while a more suitable person was sought for the permanent job. However, she killed her new role, one that she desperately wanted to have. Her ratings were hirer than the old host, and she expected to be compensated for that.

 

Avery also had some responsibility for searching for stories when she learned that the ongoing work at the 9/11 Commission result in the unexpected discovery of the new identification of a body fragment in the North Tower. Victoria Ford, on 9/11/01, had been indicted on a murder charge, and she was in the World Trade Center to talk with her attorney at his office on the 80^th floor. She tried going to the roof where she hoped to be rescued, but her attorney and the rest of his office people chose to descend in a stairway. It took the legal folks more than 40 minutes to get out of the building before it collapsed, but Victoria was never seen again. The case against her had a huge amount of physical evidence against her, and given the salacious nature of the crime, it had been a headline news items for the days before 9/11. But the case was never pursued because of the collapse of the building and the absence of the murder suspect.

 

Avery planned to pursue the story about the discovery of the newly-identified person, and the more she learned about Victoria, the more she realized she would get massive tv ratings as the 20^th anniversary of the tragedy neared. However, the reader learns that Avery has her own troublesome history that she has successfully kept hidden for years. She was constantly troubled by thoughts of the deaths of her mother and brother and the criminal past of her father. After completing college with a degree in journalism and then law school, she realized she would never get hired by a reputable law firm because of her father’s crimes, a Berny Madoff like Ponzi scheme crook. She chose to fall back on her degree in journalism and found a job as an investigative reporter on the West Coast with the LA Times. With her disguised identity, she gradually worked her way up the ladder until landing the job with American Events.

 

The plot was brilliantly unfolded, and information about the principal characters was artistically scattered into the story. I found the characters to be fascinating, and until the final pages, I certainly did not see how the author could so skillfully pull together all of the plots and subplots. This one is a good read or a good listen. I loved it.

Guess Again

 My third Charlie Donlea book in such a short time, and I expect there will be more, was Guess Again. Ten years ago, 17-year-old Callie Jones went missing. About to start her senior year of high school, she was going to be the valedictorian, was a star athlete, and was beautiful. At an end of the summer high school party, she was missing and no trace of her was ever found.

The great rogue detective Ethan Hall was so disturbed by the case that he opted out of law enforcement, went to medical school, and at a later than normal age, became a successful ER doctor. Ten years later, Hall’s detective partner was about to retire. Although the Jones case was cold, this detective had unsuccessfully continued to look for clues, and he begged Hall to come back and have another look. It turns out that Callie’s dad was the man who was about to become the governor, and he offered Hall the chance to cancel all of his med school debts if he would take leave from the hospital to do so. In love withh is work as a doctor, Hall was reluctant to do so, but the financial incentive was one he could not pass up. Hall’s hospital administrator was not happy about Hall’s agreement to do so. The governor placed Hall back on the case as a special hire.

 

Hall did not know he was about to encounter a serial killer and the killer’s psychopathic girlfriend. That’s when the story really took off. I won’t be a spoiler, just add this book to your reading queue.

Those Empty Eyes

 Those Empty Eyes was my second Charlie Donlea murder mystery novel. He has quickly moved up to my list of favorite authors, along with Michael Connelly, Daniel Silva, Louise Penny, Robert Crais, and C.J. Box. If he had a more substantial body of work already produced, I might include Grant Rosenberg in this list, but he’s just published one three-book series about a unique character, Gideon. I raved about Donlea’s The Girl Who Was Taken, and Those Empty Eyes was the next one in audiobook form that I could get on Libby. 

The story starts with the horrendous murders of a husband, wife, and son, leaving only the 17-year-old daughter who had miraculously escaped the massacre. The killer fled and the girl emerged from her hiding spot only to find her dead family members. To protect herself in case he came back, she picked up the shotgun the killer had discarded. When the police arrived, Alexandra Quinlin was sitting on the floor with the shotgun in her lap, covered with blood, and uncontrollably sobbing.

 

The police mistakenly identified Alexandra as the killer even though the murder scene did not fully support that scenario. She had just finished her junior year of high school, and the police whisked her away to a juvenile detention facility where she spent the next two months. It was then that a pro bono attorney got her charges dismissed. But, the case of her family’s murder was never solved. Devastated by this turn of events, the lawyer and his wife took Alexandra into their home and they became her guardians, her surrogate parents. That was when the story got even more interesting.

 

The lawyer filed a wrongful arrest case against the city, and he won a multimillion dollar suit on her behalf. However, there were people in and out of the police department who did not accept this outcome and clung to the belief that she really was the murderer. She was pursued by a local reporter who began to make a career for herself based on her false belief of Alexandra’s guilt. Meanwhile, Alexandra was reeling from this series of events and she found it impossible to go back to school. Having been a beautiful girl who was both a brilliant student and athlete who was headed for a great life, she was suddenly depressed, unable to concentrate, and at a loss of her direction in life. She changed her name, moved to England, but was still unable to get her life organized. She was involved in drugs and other meaningless activities. Finally, the lawyer offered her a job to come back to the U.S. and to work for him as an investigator.

 

Alex turned out to be very good at her new direction, but after 10 years, she was assigned to a case which was rather similar to her own. That’s when this already gripping story became even more so. Enough said. I won’t be a spoiler for these good stories and great plot.

The Girl Who Was Taken

The Girl Who Was Taken is Charlie Donlea’s second novel of the 11 that are currently listed in my Google search, and it is his first novel reviewed in this blog, but I’ll guarantee it won’t be the last one. I continue to find it exciting to find a good mystery novelist and find that the author already has created a significant volume of work. The author was suggested to me by one of my daughters who said Donlea was quickly becoming her favorite author in this genre. She had read several of his books already, but none of those were available in audiobook format on Libby, so I “settled” on this one. It was fantastic, and after reading one book, I plan to look for more.

Megan McDonald had just graduated from high school when she was kidnapped. She was also a star athlete and was on her way to a scholarship ride at Duke. But, she disappeared from a high school celebration party, and her story hit the headlines nationwide. Missing the same night, was a lifelong friend of Megan’s, Nicole Cutty. Hardly the student-athlete that Megan had been, Nicole had only scratched her way through high school while she looked for good times, not her own future. Nicole had a very dark side to her character. It was Megan’s story that stayed in the press, especially after she escaped from her captivity after 13 days. A year later, with the help of a ghost writer and pressure from her mom to complete the task, Megan published a book of her ordeal which immediately became a best seller. She was seen as a hero, was in demand on the talk show circuit, was known to be a woman who escaped her captor (who had never been caught), one who had emotionally healed from the ordeal – facts which Megan eventually revealed were untrue. But other girls had also gone missing and it seemed a serial killer was at work.

 

Meanwhile, Nicole’s older sister Livia had graduated from medical school and was completing a fellowship program in pathology. She was guilt ridden because she had not taken a call from the always troubled Nicole on the night of her disappearance. Livia contacted Megan to pick her brain about the details of what had happened to her, details which never appeared in her book.

 

Donlea’s characters were quite believable, and it sounded as if the characters in his book were sincerely emotionally traumatized by their ordeals. The plot kept me riveted to the book. Donlea skillfully jumped back and forth between prior times when Megan was a little girl, when she was in school, when she was an athlete, and the present as success in the unraveling of the killer’s identity came closer to being discovered. This was an excellent suspense and murder mystery, cleverly written, and it gets my very strong recommendation. There will be more Donlea in my life.