Story for the Week
I was about six when I saw Dirty Harry for the first time. Now before you go getting all judge-y on my parents, you have to know that they didn’t intend for me to see Dirty Harry when I was six. We had all piled into the family station wagon to see 2001: A Space Odyssey. We had a paper grocery bag full of popcorn 🍿, our sleeping bags 😴, and the speaker hanging on the window at Sheridan Drive-In.
It was a double feature that evening, and my parents logically assumed that the G-rated movie would play earlier than the R-rated movie because of parents bringing their kids. (I certainly would have assumed that.) When the movie started, however, my parents discovered that the drive-in was actually airing Dirty Harry twice—once before 2001 and once after. (It was the newer film, after all.) We had already paid, so we stayed for both films. I don’t remember 2001, but thus began my love affair with police procedurals and crime shows.
When I was growing up in the 70s, I watched them with my dad—Starsky & Hutch, Adam-12, The Rockford Files, Quincy M.E., CHiPs. Today, our DVR has more police and crime shows than any other genre. If you do a search on IMDb.com for the top crime TV shows, I watch or watched 15% of the top 100 and even of the top 200—Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, Blue Bloods, Criminal Minds are all staples for me. If my husband and I are looking for a random show or movie to watch together, a crime show is probably a good bet for something we’ll both enjoy. Even my default ringtone is the theme song to NCIS.
One of my former shows featured a young Johnny Depp. Before he became Captain Jack Sparrow, Johnny Depp was Officer Tom Hanson in 21 Jump Street, a TV series that aired in the 80s about undercover police officers who specialized in investigations in high schools and colleges because they looked young enough to blend in. That’s the main theme in The Secrets They Left Behind.
Book Review
⭐⭐⭐
3 Stars for The Secrets They Left Behind by Lissa Marie Redmond
299 pages
Publisher: Crooked Lane Books
Publication Date: April 7, 2020
I received an advance copy of this title from NetGalley and Crooked Lane Books.
Publisher’s Description
Three college freshmen go missing from their rural hometown of Kelly’s Falls while on Christmas break. Their cell phones, coats, and purses are left behind, but the girls have disappeared without a trace. As the days turn into weeks and the investigation grows cold, 23-year-old Buffalo police officer Shea O’Connor is called on to dig up leads undercover.
Still bearing the emotional and physical scars of a previous case, O’Connor infiltrates as 18-year-old Shea Anderson, a college freshman and the “niece” of the town’s police chief. As she begins to immerse herself in the missing girls’ world, befriending their friends and family, and doing whatever it takes to maintain her cover, O’Connor realizes the track is far colder than she initially thought. But whoever was behind the girls’ disappearance was only warming up, and they have set their crosshairs directly on her.
The heat is on for O’Connor as she closes in on the shocking truth about what really happened the night the girls vanished.
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Lissa Marie Redmond’s The Secrets They Left Behind was an intriguing concept, reminding me of the TV series 21 Jump Street, where young-looking police officers were recruited and assigned to infiltrate high schools and colleges to combat youth crime. At 23, Shea O’Connor isn’t much older than the college students she is supposed to befriend, so it wasn’t much of a stretch. In the end, I thought this book was ok. It wasn’t a clunker, but it wasn’t much of a thriller from my perspective either.
I guessed pretty early on who was involved. I just didn’t know how, so it felt a little slow and predictable. Shea spent more time socializing than actually solving the crime, which is what the local police chief also accused her of. Her response was that she needed to become friends with these people in order to get them to trust her so she could get information. I get that, and the author is a former cold case detective, so she knows how this works. It just felt like the story wasn’t focused enough on the crime. I also had a hard time believing that the FBI would send her in undercover with no backup (spoiler on this below).
There were some editing things that I hope were cleaned up before publication (clique instead of cliche, roll instead of role, feel instead of fell), but the big one that kept cropping up was “could care less” versus “couldn’t care less.” I know this is me being the grammar police, but this is one that really bugs me, and it wasn’t a typo because the author used it three times. I would also have suggested changing the name of the serial killer in Shea’s first undercover op with the FBI. I was surprised to realize that Terry Roberts was a woman, and it had me second-guessing what I had already read.
Now a couple of things that didn’t ring true or were too predictable that I didn’t want to spoil for other readers.
***SPOILERS*** SPOILERS***SPOILERS***
I suspected early on that the chief was involved, and I had a hard time believing that the FBI would have suspected him and not sent Shea in with other backup, told her that the chief was her only backup, and then not have backup in place when the story broke that blew her cover. That just felt too convenient to create the “suspenseful” conclusion of the case.
I also knew how the love interest with Nick was going to play out, that as soon as he found out who she was (and he would) that he was going to be angry but that they would eventually get back together for their happily ever after. It struck me as a bit cliche. If this were a romance novel, it would make sense, but not for a mystery or thriller.
All in all, not a bad read but not a great one either.
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