The Forgotten Girls by Sara Blaedel

Gut Instinct Rating - 3.5

Characters - 4

Believability for type and topics - 5

Similarity to other books - 5

Writing Style - 4.5

Excitement Factor - 3

Story Line - 4

Title Relevance - 5

Cover art - 3

Goodreads users gave this book a 3.56. I think it was more deserving of a 4.11.

Emoji Meter: 😡 😟 😒

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Published in 2015.

Pages: 308.

Number of books by author: 17 Works.

Genre: Crime Fiction.

Publishing Company: Grand Central Publishing

Let me start by saying a 4.11 rating is a bit deceiving because I didn't love this book that much. I really wouldn't have given this much more than 3.5 stars. I just didn't love this book. It was just "meh." It was entertaining enough to read, but no that page-turner people said it was. The characters were all just fine. No one stood out. I thought the secondary characters were really unnecessary. Why do I care (maybe this is because this is a series, and I'm reading book 7) about Louise's friends? I don't. I don't care if they're married. Maybe it's supposed to provide a relief from the heavy story line, but I think her son and 'roommate' did that just fine. I also thought the mixture of ex-es seemed a bit over-board... three exes (I suppose two and a fling) in one book is a bit much for a few-week span. And why have a foster child (and again, maybe this is covered in other books, but I'll get to that in a moment) without explanation. People, especially cops, don't become foster parents for no reason. And it would be hard for a single parent, female cop, to become a foster parent anyways. Just challenging the possibility of some of these things. The overall believability was really well done. I think without bringing too much of the past into the present (because I don't like historical reads), Blaedel did a good job of keeping everything connected. Because of the history of acceptance with mental retardation, this book was very unique without much effort. The writing style was good. However, a lot of my previous questions are bothersome because this book potentially doesn't stand alone. I can't stand a long-winded series

(such as this one) that requires you to read the previous books for it all to make sense; anything with a crime-like focus should be able to stand alone and still be able to explain all of these things without trouble (think Law & Order SVU, Criminal Minds, CSI, etc. These episodes all stand alone, but for avid watchers, there's a little extra story line in each season). There wasn't really much excitement for me. I thought the book was kind of bland, actually. I wasn't flipping through pages quickly, and was able to put it down multiple times with ease. The last 15-30 pages were pretty exciting, but outside of that, it was just kind of... "lah-de-dah." The story line was also kind of fine. The ending was a bit strange... there was a certain attack at the end that seemed really far fetched considering the amount of police coverage... it just wasn't real believable, nor was it a logical place in the story. The ending itself was just kind of strange, as well. I didn't really care for the last few moments of the book, especially because there wasn't really any closure (again, this goes back to the book standing alone as well as within a series), which I disliked. The title was attention-grabbing, which is probably what landed it on my TBR, to be honest. The cover art wasn't great. I think I would've preferred a psych-ward, or the equivalent of what a mental-retardation ward would've looked like, on the cover, or the scarred face of our primary victim. There's a lot of different pieces of art that could've been much more related to the topic of the entire story than what we were left with, which wasn't much, honestly. Again, I don't know that this book really deserves the 4 stars it received. It's a 3.5 star book in my mind, but it stood the test of certain important aspects that a book requires to be fundamentally good. Would I read it again? No. Is it going to be up for sale? Yup!