Again, we get a title that matches the story; someone is being stalked. In this next installment, Lucy Kincaid has arrived at Quantico for new FBI agent training. She is one of thirty-some odd students in a training class. You’d think with all her experience that she would fly through the training, but one instructor seems to have it out for Lucy, making her nervous and struggle in some of her courses. Has he read her personal file, the one that says when she was eighteen she was lured online by a predator, raped during a livestream, and then killed her rapist in cold blood? Or does he have a bad history with Kate, Lucy’s sister-in-law who works in cybercrimes at Quantico, and now he’s taking it out on Lucy?
We’re not even to the stalking part of Stalked yet. The major plot of Allison Brennan’s novel is a woman’s body was found in the parking lot near Citi Stadium, a baseball field in NYC. She was a reporter working on a true crime novel about the Cinderella Strangler — the case that the FBI, the NYPD, and Lucy and her boyfriend, Sean, worked on in Kiss Me, Kill Me. The reporter was most famous for her first sensationalized true crime novel, which explored a the rape and murder of a twelve-year-old girl fifteen years before. The girl was stolen from her bed at night, and the reporter dug into the family, learning the parents were swingers who hosted sex parties with drugs and alcohol. While the man who murdered the girl was found, could someone still harbor anger toward the reporter who made the story “sensational”? Perhaps her brother, who was nine at the time, and now would be twenty-four?
Because Lucy was involved in the Cinderella Strangler case, she’s called away from Quantico to assist the FBI NYC field office and NYPD once again. However, she goes back to class immediately, meaning the novel takes our lead from New York City to Quantico (in Virginia) repeatedly. There are a lot of folks jumping on planes. Meanwhile, other individuals involved with police and FBI from the case with the little girl are showing up dead from heart attacks, including one of Lucy’s instructors at Quantico. Since a Quantico instructor was killed in Quantico, the only answer is the murderer is someone at Quantico.
Interspersed with Lucy’s story, we get the first-person perspective of that nine-year-old boy whose sister was killed. How he hated his parents for their irresponsible parties, how he was harassed in high school via written threats and dead animals left in his locker, how he emancipated from his parents at sixteen, how he went to college, and, most interestingly, how he fell in love with a woman during college who later disappeared after he found a pig carcass in his bed. Is she the one stalking him?
Overall, this novel finds our characters in flux. The young man trying to avoid his stalker, Lucy trying to survive training when she’s told she didn’t earn her place there, the NYC FBI agent deciding if she’s willing to let the NYPD officer back into her personal life, and Sean, who is at home waiting for Lucy to finish training. Can you believe I related to this book a good deal? Not the murder stuff, but the part about Lucy doing important educational training for weeks and missing Sean, and when things get hard, he can’t be there with her.
On the other hand, the motive of the stalker felt iffy to me. It’s also interesting that Lucy has a master’s in criminal psychology, and the FBI uses her to analyze crime scenes and get in the head of a murderer. She’s twenty-seven, if I remember correctly; she has no direct experience profiling criminals between finishing her master’s and the FBI calling her in as a consult. I wish Brennan would go into Lucy’s education instead of repeatedly bringing up how she was a victim in a timeline that precedes the novels. For now, we are meant to think that being smart and a victim will give you intuition that can’t be taught.
Grab the Lapels 
I read Brennan’s See How They Hide, because that was what the library had, and to get a feel for the author. I’m afraid it didn’t appeal – I didn’t hate it, but I thought Brennan was all over the place with multiple points of view and in the end I skipped whenever the pov was a victim or perpatrator and just followed the detectives.
LikeLike
See How They Hide it’s the 6th book in a series I haven’t read. I think in one book, the first (?), in the Lucy Kincaid series, she used the killer’s POV, and I didn’t like it. I guess I just feel like a normal author is never going to be good at getting into the point of view of a killer, because we just can’t imagine it. I think more about what I see in videos of mass murderers who have gone to prison and gave these totally unhinged interviews with police, the kind that go on for hours and show no affect. But authors never write their killers that way because it doesn’t seem menacing enough. When I taught in the prison, I worked with several murderers, and let me tell you, they act just like your everyday person. Because they are. Except that one thing.
LikeLike
The plot Arc of the first few books involves the character wanting to get into the FBI and being a stellar detective even if they didn’t get in. Now she has fought back against rejection and gotten in but is still having to struggle with people who don’t want to acknowledge her skills. At the same time people are relying on part of her skill set she was never even trained for? I forget The source, but I often think of the idea that for every scene a character has to need something, even if it is just a glass of water. If you extrapolate that out, it sounds like the author wants to have the protagonist achieve their goal, but not achieve their goal. How long can they keep that up before it starts to feel tagged on? If the books normally follow a scenario where the protagonist breaks the case wide open and was right all along, maybe it would have been more effective for her to get a bit arrogant only to suffer a significant setback and demonstrate why she needs the FBI training despite being a stellar detective without it. 🤷♂️
LikeLike
That quote about the glass of water is from Kurt Vonnegut Jr. In this book, Lucy is still in the FBI training program. She is not an FBI agent yet. All this stuff keeps cropping up that takes her away from her studies. I wish I knew how long the training at Quantico goes on for. It’s a real place, and I’m sure I could Google it. But the point is that these books happen over a short period of time, so the believability is less about whether or not her skills are acknowledged, and more about how many psychopaths there are running around on the East Coast. I think the other part is that the author really did make Lucy a nepotism candidate. If she were rejected, so many people already in the FBI would be up in arms. So, we’re dealing with the fact that she’s a skilled human being, possibly because she’s been exposed to all the police and detective work that her family engages in, but is she there just because she has connections, or is she really that skilled? I’m not sure, because we don’t know a lot about the other students. We get little bits and pieces, like the fact that somewhere in the Marines, and some used to be police officers. But we don’t know about their detective abilities. I’d love to see a book in which she’s paired up with another student so I can compare her skills to theirs. Also, if she didn’t get into the FBI, she could still be a detective in a different agency. She could work for the police, which she did as an intern, or she could work for the company that her brother and Sean both work for. She has options, just the FBI is her dream.
LikeLike
Clarice Starling? Is this a crossover episode? 🥳
LikeLike
🤣
LikeLike
Jeez this sounds dark! Also, cute that you can relate to being away from your partner during schooling – awwww! How much longer do you have apart?
LikeLike
Nick and I have three weeks left apart. It’s tough because I feel like I’m really getting going here, so when he’s excited for me to come home, I feel bad because I’m enjoying what I’m doing. Well, then today the weather got really cold and it’s been flooding, so now my brain wants to go home despite really enjoying my time here.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Don’t feel bad! It’s normal how you’re feeling because it’s such an exciting step in your career. I’m sure Nick is excited for you too. Although cold weather, yikes, that always drives one home haha
LikeLike
Thank you ☺️
LikeLiked by 1 person
This sounds like a lot going on. Did it feel confusing as you read or did it work because you’ve already read a few in the series and know some of the characters?
LikeLike
It was easy to keep track of everyone. We get introduced to new characters, and they become like people in one novel and then come back in another. Basically, we build up a cast of characters, so it all makes sense.
LikeLiked by 1 person