I purchased this audiobook for my own collection.
Publisher: Bookouture
Published: November 9, 2023
Summary:
The little girl looked like an angel in her thin white robe, her long black hair spread around her head like a dark halo on the snow. Her hands rested on her chest, fingers interlaced as if she had fallen asleep while praying. But she would never wake up again…
When Detective Lottie Parker receives news that a child’s body has been found in the frozen grounds of the cathedral, a shiver runs down her spine. She’s terrified it will be eight-year-old Willow Devine, reported missing that morning.
But when she arrives at the cathedral, holding a photo of Willow with her blonde ponytail and gap-toothed smile, she gets a terrible shock. The body is a young girl, wrapped in a white shroud, a rosary clutched in her frozen fingers. But her hair is dark, not fair. This girl isn’t Willow but another eight-year-old, Naomi.
Desperate to find a connection between the two girls and to find Willow before it is too late, Lottie speaks to the girls’ families and discovers that both girls were altar servers at the cathedral. The charismatic priest Father Maguire has a watertight alibi for the time the girls went missing, but Lottie suspects the confused old lady traumatised by the discovery of Naomi’s body is hiding something…
A day later, Willow’s little body is found wrapped in a white robe in the snowy grounds of a church across town. Lottie is devastated, convinced now that she can’t trust anyone, least of all the girls’ parents. Why did Willow’s mother claim the girls didn’t know each other? And why are there no photos of Naomi in her mother’s shabby house?
But when a little boy from the choir goes missing too, Lottie realises she must spread her net wider. Can she stop this twisted killer before another precious life is stolen?
A completely compelling page-turner from bestselling author Patricia Gibney. If you like Rachel Caine, Kendra Elliott and Robert Dugoni, The Altar Girls will have you hooked.
My thoughts:
This is the 13th book in Patricia Gibney’s Detective Lottie Parker series and this series is so incredibly good! Yes, it’s dark and not for everyone, but I do love my crime fiction and this detective series continues to be one of my favorites – each new story feels so fresh and original!
As I have come to love with this series, not only is there a complex, complicated case that Detective Lottie Parker and her team find themselves involved in, but they are also all dealing with their own issues on the side. It is all these moving parts that keeps you flipping the pages to see how they juggle everything – that work/life balance that Gibney has made so true to life in her characters that I just love. Lottie is still dealing with her aging mum who is suffering from dementia, Boyd is focused on his son is has been taken by his ex-wife and the others all have something going on, too.
The case itself is all kinds of sinister and is so much more than what Lottie and her team originally thought. I love that Gibney is able to take a simple missing child case turned to murder and turn it upside down. You just know cases will never be straight-forward with these books and I love that because it really keeps you guessing as to how it will turn out.
I cannot recommend this book, or series, enough. Yes, they are dark books, but they are so addicting and fast-paced and if you like these types of reads, definitely give them a try!
Audio thoughts:
I was thrilled to see that Michele Moran was back to narrate this one. She had narrated the last few books in the series, which I had also listened to and I am a big stickler when it comes to consistency in narrators of series. She really does a great job bringing this series to life and I found myself listening to this one in just a day!
Books in this series:
- The Missing Ones
- The Stolen Girls
- The Lost Child
- No Safe Place
- Tell Nobody
- Final Betrayal
- Broken Souls
- Buried Angels
- Silent Voices
- Little Bones
- The Guilty Girl
- Three Widows
- The Altar Girls
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