Amy Boxer is fed up with her life. Her parents are controlling, as only a cop and a private investigator can be. She hates school and doesn’t know what she wants to do, but she is certain that she doesn’t want to do what her parents expect her to do!  So she is leaving home, after months of planning and preparation. She knows she has to be careful because her parents have the resources to find her so she has been planning carefully and today as she takes a final look at her room which she has stripped of everything that might be able to be used to trace her, she feels a sense of satisfaction. She walks out the door and then disappears.

Not suspecting what her daughter is planning, DI Mercy Danquah has reported her daughter missing when she hand’t returned home as expected and is horrified when she receives a note from Amy that says: “YOU WILL NEVER FIND ME!” Hurriedly, she contacts her ex, Charles Boxer, a private investigator specializing in kidnap recovery. Charles quickly begins to retrace Amy’s quickly vanishing footsteps to Madrid and soon realizes that she may have gotten caught up in the clutches of the wildly unpredictable and cruel Madrid drug lord known as El Osito. Using his connections in law enforcement Charles goes to Madrid and begins pursuing El Osito in the techno bars and nightlife of the city where Amy was last seen, putting his own life in jeopardy.

In the meantime, unable to work on her daughter’s case, Mercy tries to work off her feelings of anxiety and fear by throwing herself into a new case in which a young boy named Sasha was snatched off the streets of London. Mercy’s investigation leads her to suspect a drug connection but the leads are murky and seemingly disconnected.

Wilson captures both the teen age angst and arrogance of Amy and the absolute terror, guilt and helplessness of her parents skillfully and with deftness. Building on his earlier book, Capital Punishment, in which we were introduced to Charles Boxer’s skills as an investigator, we begin to see a softer more complicated side of his life as he tries to find his daughter. Wilson keeps the tension high and the reader guessing throughout the book, which was immensely satisfying. This is one book you should not start unless you have plenty of time to finish it!

Brenda’s Rating: ****(4 out of 5 Stars)

Recommend this book to: Marian and Sharon

Book Study Worthy: Sure

Read in ebook format.