The Lost Ones by Sheena Kamal (2017) / Girl Last Seen by Nina Laurin (2017) Spending a wonderful, leisurely day at our local library, we stumbled upon something we don't often encounter in the New Release section.......two recent thrillers almost identical in their basic plot structure and their deeply damaged, flawed young female protagonists......
You can easily think of both these broken but tough women as soul sisters of "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo"s Lisabeth Salander......survivors of unspeakably horrific childhoods who find themselves thrust into the role of avenging angels, at long last confronting their evil tormentors.......
And the same dark quest consumes both Nora Watts of "The Lost Ones" and Ella Santos of "Girl Last Seen".......they take up a desperate hunt for the daughters they gave up for adoption, daughters brutally snatched away from the families who raised them.....children who were the result of Nora and Ella being abducted and raped by their captors.
Sheena Kamal's "The Lost Ones" is a far more ambitious version of this tale, its action spread across the back alleys of Vancouver to the expansive, snowy landscapes of the Canadian wilderness. And in Nora Watts, Kama fashions a memorable creation.....part indigenous Native, a recovering alcoholic, who's scraping together a living as a private eye. Her two unique gifts: an ingrained ability to detect liars and oddly enough, a beautiful, powerful singing voice....(she favors the Blues)....before Nora arrives at her long expected blood drenched showdown with overpowering evil, she gets to use both talents to confuse and confound her enemies.....
While Kama's novel busily throws in a variety of issues, (racial discrimination, stem cell research, unscrupulous corporate mining in Canada and the Congo), Nina Laurin's "Girl Last Seen" keeps the story stripped down to its essentials.......the PTSD suffered by Ella Santos, from a childhood kept in captivity by a pedophile, has left her a hopeless drug addict, barely able to hold down a job. Impregnated by her still at large rapist captor, Nora let a wealthy family adopt the child.....a child who's now been possibly taken by the same unidentified monster who vicitmized Ella.
(And this is the point where we stop talking,lest we give away any revelations and twists)
Two vividly drawn heroines......each with heartbreaking backstories and harrowing ordeals yet to come as they struggle through insurmountable odds to rescue
their children. For late summer beach reads ( or any old time), BQ says snag 'em both. 4 stars for each book....(****)
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