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