I purchased this book for my own personal collection. I borrowed the audiobook from the library.
Publisher: Crooked Lane Books / Dreamscape Media
Published: February 9, 2021 / February 25, 2021
Summary:
She left the NYPD in the firestorm of a high-profile case gone horribly wrong. Three years later, the ghosts of her past roar back to terrifying life.
When NYPD undercover cop Laney Bird’s cover is blown in a racketeering case against the Russian mob, she flees the city with her troubled son, Alfie. Now, three years later, she’s found the perfect haven in Sylvan, a charming town in upstate New York. But then the unthinkable happens: her boy vanishes.
Local law enforcement dismisses the thirteen-year-old as a runaway, but Laney knows better. Alfie would never abandon his special routines and the sanctuary of their home. Could he have been kidnapped–or worse? As a February snowstorm rips through the region, Laney is forced to launch her own investigation, using every trick she learned in her years undercover.
As she digs deeper into the disappearance, Laney learns that Alfie and a friend had been meeting with an older man who himself vanished, but not before leaving a corpse in his garage. With dawning horror, Laney discovers that the man was a confidential informant from a high-profile case she had handled in the past. Although he had never known her real identity, he knows it now. Which means several other enemies do, too. Time is running out, and as Laney’s search for her son grows more desperate, everything depends on how good a detective she really is–badge or no.
My thoughts:
This is the first book in Emilya Naymark’s Sylvan series, though I have already read, and really enjoyed, book two, Behind the Lie. I was sent book two last year and while my preference is usually to read series in order, timing just didn’t work out, so I read them out of order. Luckily, the book worked well as a stand-alone, but after enjoying it so much, I knew I had to go back and start at the beginning and I’m so glad I did…I really liked this one, too!
Knowing what comes next, I feel like I had some answers already when things happened, but that in no way detracted from my enjoyment of the book. In fact, it only heightened my thought processes as I read because I tried to puzzle things out myself, looking for clues that may or may not have been there. I did love getting a better picture of Laney’s backstory – why she left her job with the NYPD and why she’s in her current situation. That was a crucial part of character development that I really needed fully fleshed out for myself and while we get a little of that in the second book, it’s not to the same extent it is here.
There are a lot of moving parts to this story – there is the fact that Laney’s son, Alfie is missing, but then there is also Laney’s past and the mystery surrounding that. I loved how the story switched from the past to the present as it kept things moving and it also helped fill in more pieces to the overall puzzle of what was going on. The twists and turns this one takes really kept me engaged and I have to say, it even got a bit emotional at times, which I wasn’t expecting.
This was just as great a read as the second book, Behind the Lie, and I really hope there will be more books coming in this series.
Audio thoughts:
I decided to listen to this one and it was great on audio. The narrator, Cynthia Farrell, does a great job bringing the story to life. Her pacing and intonation were spot on. I found myself completely engaged in this one and didn’t want to put it down once I started it!
Books in this series:
- Hide in Place
- Behind the Lie
