This the second book in the Jane Ryland series by qward-winning and Boston Globe bestselling author Hank Phillippi Ryan.

Jane gets a tip from a former co-worker who is searching for her birth mother. Jane begins to suspect a highly-respected adoption agency of harboring a secret. She beings to wonder if they are reunited birth parents with the wrong children.

BPD Detective Jake Brogan and his partner are investigating a young woman's brutal murder leaving two toddlers to enter into the state's foster system. At first, it appeared to be the result of a domestic incident, but there is an empty cradle at the murder scene - but no baby.

When Jane starts getting threatening phone calls, she knows she is on the right track. ( )

The characters from the first book move along with more depth and background. Lots of not so believeable interactions between journalist and detective, but it made the story work. I do enjoy Phillipi-Ryans writing style and will go forward with the series for sure. ( )

I enjoyed the 2nd installment of the Jane Ryland series, although I haven’t read the first. I think that other than the back story on the relationship between Jake and Jane, the book easily can be read as a standalone.
In this book, a fellow reporter, Tuck, is searching for her birth mother, but believes the agency provides her with incorrect information. As people associated with the agency being dying, Jane and Jake uncover a sinister plot. ( )

Review: Wrong Girl by Hank Phillippi Ryan. 4* 01/04/2021

I enjoyed reading this book because the fantastic writing and constructive quality. I loved the well developed characters and the theme within the book. This fast paced suspense story has many twist and turns and takes the reader right into the center of danger with a killer on the loose, a missing baby and the race against time. The main theme is an investigation into an Adoptive Agency, Children’s Services, and how children sometimes fall through the cracks of the Welfare Department.

I enjoyed Jane Rylands as a journalistic reporter. A former colleague of Janes was adopted as an infant and asked Jane if she could investigate her birth mother that the adoptive agency leads her too. For some reason Jane’s friend had a strange feeling about the whole situation.

Jane is also joined with Jake Brogan, a detective and they make a great team. They were working together on a complex crime investigation. This included a corrupt and scandalous foster care and adoption system. The story included mystery, intriguing events and some sexual tension between the reporter and detective. As the story goes on with a lot of corruption and murder through the years and cases being discovered with no biological matches at all… ( )

As far as pop fiction mysteries go, this one wasn't too bad. The mystery/detective plot was actually pretty good. Nothing too outrageous nor obvious. What provoked the two star ranking is twofold: 1) incessant rhetorical questions by characters that are obvious to any reader with half a brain and do nothing to further the story. "Why is he here? Who murdered X?" The reader is already wondering these things; the author does not need to tell the reader to wonder these things. Rhetorical questions of this nature are space fillers and suggest to me that the author did not have enough material to flesh out the story in better ways. (True, rhetorical questions are even more obvious in audiobooks than they are in paper, perhaps because I can't skim over them the same way. Nevertheless...) @) nearly every dialogue in the book seemed to be interrupted by the protagonist's impatience/frustration/distraction/etc which only served to frustrate me. You know when you watch a soap opera and the actors pause frequently and then the scene cuts away and the story moves forward like a glacier as a result? [Joey on FRIENDS explained this concept really well.] That's the effect these interruptions had for me, except when the interruption was especially lengthy: then I simply forgot that I was reading a dialogue altogether! I wanted to yell, "Just let the person speak and actually listen to them!" Instead, characters were so focussed on one thing they missed relevant information. (Just like in the soaps.) Once or twice with this stylistic device, okay, I can handle that. But when nearly every conversation seemed to follow this pattern? Exasperating. More uninterrupted dialogue, please.

Read another by this author? Maybe if I'm desperate for an audiobook, but it won't be soon. ( )