Grab the Lapels

The Lost Girls by Allison Brennan

I’m back with another review from the FBI agent Lucy Kincaid series. It feels inaccurate to call them the Lucy Kincaid books because her fiancé, Sean Rogan, always has his own side job that gets entangled in what Lucy is doing at work with the FBI (you just have to suspend disbelief). In The Lost Girls (#11), the novel opens with a priest finding a baby on his doorstep. The newborn has a locket with a photo inside, and on the back of the photo is a phone number.

That number is to photojournalist Siobhan, and after she is contacted, we find her staked outside in a house in middle-of-nowhere Texas because she has some information suggesting two missing teens that Siobhan knew growing up may be held there. Siobhan believes the infant belongs to one of the two teens. She gets photos of the house, some people leaving, including a young woman with a baby, and then decides to do a B&E to see if the girls are being held captive. Instead, she finds another woman, heavily pregnant, chained to a bed. Siobhan is spotted, police are called, and the local sheriff molests her while doing a body search.

Thanks to coincidence, Siobhan is a friend of Sean’s family and in love with Sean’s brother, Kane. I do appreciate how Allison Brennan made both the Lucy Kincaid and Sean Rogan families large, meaning she can bring in siblings at a moment’s notice. Not one is a regular human. They are FBI agents, psychologists, mercenaries, extraction specialists, computer hackers, former military, etc. It certainly makes for a fun series! Because Siobhan knows the Rogan family, she immediately trusts Lucy, but no other police. We learn that the focus of the novel is about trafficking young women, particularly immigrants (Texas is on the border of Mexico) and teen girls who fought with their families and felt they couldn’t go home again. This isn’t a prostitution ring, though; it’s black-market baby sales.

Because Lucy cannot have children, the case hits her hard. Typically, she comes home each night to tell Sean about her case, and he calms and comforts her, functioning as her center of gravity. But in The Lost Girls, Sean has to leave for his own work just as the case about infants starts. He’s in middle-of-nowhere Mexico with limited communication abilities in a highly dangerous situation. He’s with his brother Kane, the mercenary, but will they succeed? Can Lucy get through her toughest case alone?

Surprisingly, I thought the first part of the novel was slow. I don’t want to sound heartless, but trafficking women to sell their newborns isn’t that different from trafficking children to be drug mules or trafficking women as prostitutes, which are some cases Lucy was on previously. I wondered, What is Brennan up to? She’s not usually a slow starter… Finally, I read the back of the book for a clue–and learned that Sean has a son. Gah! Okay, that feels like a spoiler if I ever read one, and it’s right there on the back cover!

The job Sean and Kane have taken is unique. While Lucy was at work, a woman showed up to the house to ask Sean to retrieve her son and husband, both of whom were in Mexico and supposed to be home in California a few days ago. She cannot reach them. This woman? It’s Sean’s girlfriend from his freshman year of college. Readers know from previous books that Sean was kicked out of Stanford for revealing a professor had child pornography on his computer, but rather than simply report it, Sean hacked into different computer systems and released the information in a way that embarrassed both the university and FBI. Thus, he was expelled though able to transfer to MIT, thousands of miles away. When Sean left, he did not know his girlfriend was pregnant. Sean was only seventeen.

Sean sees a picture of his twelve-year-old son, and there is no doubt it’s his—his kid is a mini me. He contacts Kane, tells him the scoop, and they’re off to Mexico to find his son…. But not before Lucy gets home from work and tells Sean what a horrible case she’s on, one that affects her deeply due to her infertility. To spare Lucy’s feelings, Sean doesn’t tell her he has a child.

Whereas previous novels in the series had a lot of internal speculation, The Lost Girls is more plot driven. The writing loses something from that, but the focus seems to be whether Lucy and Sean can weather a giant secret between them. I wasn’t quite as enthralled with this installment because there wasn’t much to wonder about. It was obvious early on that Lucy’s and Sean’s cases would overlap (readers, just go with it). The only mystery was whether the teens Siobhan sought were alive or dead. Not my favorite, but I did enjoy thinking about how a tween boy would fit into Sean’s and Lucy’s lives.

On a positive note, Brennan still has an amazing knack for giving all her characters “life,” even if we only meet them for a page or two. For example, the sheriff, held after hours to meet with Lucy, says, “It’s not late — my wife will tell you we eat promptly at six every night, but by the time the kids get back from practice and clean up and whoever is supposed to be cooking actually cooks — we rotate between the kids — it’s closer to eight. Which is fine with me, because my seven-to-five shift rarely ends at five. And it’s Monday. Which means Isabella’s cooking, so help me.”

I do look forward to the next book.

books of winter 🎄⛄❄️

  • Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools by Jonathan Kozol
  • Monster: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Deder (DNF)
  • This is Not a Book about Benedict Cumberbatch by Tabitha Carvan
  • Crafting for Sinners by Jenny Kiefer
  • Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man by Emmanuel Acho
  • Suggs Black Backtracks by Martha Ann Spencer (DNF)
  • Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval (DNF)
  • The Lost Girls by Allison Brennan (#11)
  • Deliverance by James Dickey
  • Devil’s Call by J. Danielle Dorn
  • Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
  • Jaws by Peter Benchley
  • The New York trilogy by Paul Auster
  • The True True Story of Raja the Gullible by Rabih Alameddine
  • The Man Who Shot Out My Eye is Dead by Chanelle Benz
  • All of Me by Venise Berry
  • At Wit’s End by Erma Bombeck
  • Minding the Store: Great Literature About Business from Tolstoy to Now edited by Robert Coles and Albert LaFarge
  • Touched by Kim Kelly
  • Awakened by Laura Elliott
  • The Road to Helltown by S.M. Reine (Preternatural Affairs series #9)
  • After Life by Andrew Neiderman
  • How to Save a Misfit by Ellen Cassidy

21 comments

    • I read one book by her called something like the sorority murders, and I was totally hooked on her writing style. I find her really engaging. If you check out the sorority murder, there’s only two books in that series, so it’s not a big commitment. It’s about a college student who podcasts about another student who had been murdered or gone missing, something like that, and then he finds this woman living in the area who’s a retired FBI agent, and she starts to get involved with this podcast. It was really cool!

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  2. I always enjoy reading your reviews of this series, even if I think I’m unlikely to pick them up myself! I have been thinking of you with this storm in the US, and hope you are all doing okay. (I mean, you might be hundreds of miles away – my geography of the US is non-existent – but I have been thinking of you nonetheless!)

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    • I’m so glad that people are enjoying the series. It’s always strange to think whether folks will keep up with the series, or if they just totally forget everything I’ve already said, but this one does seem to be weirdly popular with my readers.

      Thank you for thinking of me in the snow. Yes, it is freezing, but Nick and I have electricity, so we are good. The roads are really dicey, but this old fella who lives around the corner keeps snow plowing my driveway, so that’s a bonus. I think the biggest issue is just that it’s so cold that the snow is really fluffy, so when it’s windy, the snow just keeps piling up and drifts.

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  3. I’m happy to turn my brain off in the truck and let these formulaic stories wash over me (as Audiobooks). It’s no different from watching crime shows on tv. (Reacher is my current favourite). We were talking about literary writing earlier (yesterday your time), and I’m sure you notice that Brennan makes her writing unobtrusive, as unliterary as possible, so it doesn’t get between you and the story.

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    • One time, several years ago, Nick and I were listening to an audiobook on our way to a cabin that we had rented. The book was written by a man who’s known for his horror writing, but he’s equally known for his translations between French and English and his philosophy lens. The book was called Immobility by Brian Evanson. Seriously, Bill, you would love this book. The only issue is that it wasn’t formulaic, and it was quite a thinker, especially more of the philosophical stuff. I cannot guarantee that I stopped at every stop sign on that drive because I was so enamored.

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  5. I feel like I have gotten to know these characters through your reviews, it’s been quite fun – and yes, lots of suspension of disbelief, but I’m here for it!

    Child trafficking is something I find really difficult to stomach, but these books tend to lean towards darker stuff (from what I can recall of your reviews), so I would expect no less from Brennan.

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    • I’m so glad to read your feedback, Anne. It’s always hard to know how, or if, I review a series. It makes me happy to know that readers are able to track the characters and get a sense of what the books are about.

      Yes, I assume the entire series is going to be quite dark. Lucy works mainly in different kinds of trafficking and sex crimes, so I expect that to be a big part of the series. I think it was the first book that she actually worked in a non-profit sex crimes office before she became an FBI agent.

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  6. Once again I enjoyed your analysis of this series, and the strengths and weakness of each book. I thought your point that it was more plot-driven which affected the writing was an interesting one. While I have an idea about what that might mean, can you expand a little beyond what you’ve said? Is that the writing is just a bit more this happened then that happened with little analysis? Or, that there’s not much character development (though you do mention some good characterisation of minor characters).

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    • It just seemed like Lucy and Sean never really stopped to think much about how the events unfolding were affecting them. We know from the first book, I believe, but Lucy had a hysterectomy after a violent sexual attack when she was 18. She can’t have children, though she and Sean want them in the future. They’re both very open to adoption. Meanwhile, in this story we have a black market on which people are selling babies, and once or twice Lucy mentions that she can’t have kids, and once or twice Sean thinks about how that case might be hard for her because she can’t have kids, but there’s not really much depth to it. Events just keep happening.

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