Cold Case detective Van Reed of the BCA finds danger and begins to come to terms with her own very troubled past when she is assigned to look into the case of two young girls who go missing in Leech Lake, Minnesota, on a sunny summer day in 1980.

The case gets more complicated when the body of a woman buried alive is found in a secluded part of Minneapolis in the summer of 2022 and she proves to be one of the girls not seen since 1980. Van, who was a former member of the Minneapolis Police Department before joining the BCA, is forced to work with a detective who was instrumental in freezing her out of the MPD. He also has a connection to the Leech Lake case which he isn't eager to share.

Van works with forensic scientist Harry Steinbeck who is her polar opposite. He is meticulous in his methods and personal appearance; she's prone to hunches and lives surrounded by garbage. However, the two play off each other well and have some hidden similarities which come out in the story.

As Van investigates those witnesses who are still alive and retraces the crime, she suffers flashbacks of her own childhood when she was raised in a cult run by an obsessive patriarch. She only got out when the cult's leader was arrested and jailed for tax evasion. Van began having prophetic visions while still in the cult. They have sometimes helped her with her police work, but they have also led her to vigilantism where she has killed people she wasn't able to bring to justice through the legal system.

This was an interesting mystery with intriguing characters including a very creepy villain. I enjoyed the characters and the setting. I liked seeing a new relationship beginning for Van and Harry. ( )

The Taken Ones by Jess Lourey
Steinbeck & Reed #1

Terrifying, twisted, and terrific ~ Couldn’t put it down.

What I liked:
* Evangeline “Van” Reed: difficult childhood, bright, left police to work cold cases at Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, lucid dreams that prove to be true, has a bit of PTSD, has a secret, Intriguing
* Harry Steinbeck, forensic scientist, seeks facts, dapper dresser, caring, kind, tenacious, has a secret that I want to know
* That Van and Harry seem opposites who work well together – eager to see what they tackle next
* The supporting characters that work with Van and Harry – would like to get to know Kyle, Johnna and Deepty better
* The police procedural aspects of the story and how the cold case was solved
* That the cold case of the girls kidnapping, and the case of the woman buried alive were both solved by the end of the story
* All of it really except…

What I didn’t like:
* Who and what I was meant not to
* Thinking about how warped and twisted the criminals were…and there were quite a few in this book
* The closed ranks of the police and the way they treated Van

Did I enjoy this book? Yes
Would I read more in this series? Yes

Thank you to NetGalley and Thomas & Mercer for the ARC – This is my honest review.

4-5 Stars ( )

My Thoughts:

The story is not just crime fiction. It has an element of the paranormal in it. Van's instincts are so bang on that it borders on the supernatural.

I love the premise of this book! Paranormal hunches that are always correct! Catching the bad guys! Wonderful! What is not so wonderful is the way the author makes the heroine so masochistically subservient, it is royally pissing me off!

I think the author wrote it so that the readers would hate Detective Dave Comstock. And I do! Specially when he did not shake Van's hand and said "you never belonged". No decent human being does that!! But, that's the key word: "decent" human being, isn't it?...

I got so annoyed with Comstock that I stopped reading this book and picked up another. Then when I forgot my annoyance, I pick this book up again. So, no, this book was not a fast-paced read for me.

Police outright harassing other officers of the law? Like, what century are these people living in?! I thought that was what the Bureau of Internal Affairs are for!...

I am also not very agreeable with vigilante justice. Not in fiction books anyway. So, I am in a dilemma here...

And what's up with Van taking out garbage bags to the chute?...

At the start of the book, Van was kind of a weak character. She lets people run rough shod over her. She takes her frustrations out on her poor subordinates. Then at the end, she all of a sudden speaks out to Comstock? That character inconsistency there brought the character development down a notch.

This is my first Carly Robins audiobook and I would listen to her again.

Now we have to wait a year for the next Steinbeck and Reed book to come out!

Quantitative Evaluation:
Story telling quality = 3.5
Character development = 3
Story itself = 3
Writing Style = 3
Ending = 4
World building = 4
Cover art = 4.5
Pace = (10 hrs and 31 mins listening time)
Plot = 3
Narration = 5

Overall Rating: 3.5 out of 5 ( )