This is the eighth of the D.D. Warren mysteries, and it's a good one.
Flora Dane was kidnapped and held for over a year before she was rescued and her kidnapper killed. She's a survivor--but she's never really moved past it. Things happened during that year that she's never told anyone, and as a result she has a mission she's never shared with anyonxe, either. And one night in Boston, she goes out to a bar, and winds up killing the hunky bartender who tried to kidnap her.
D.D. Warren is the Boston P.D. detective who responds to the scene. One the one hand, they find evidence that this may not have been Devon Crawford's first kidnapping. On the other hand, Dane's responses and affect strike her as Not Right in ways that can't be pinned down precisely.
It's the start of a wild and confusing hunt. As she works her way through the very tangled evidence, D.D. is dealing with Dane, her mother, their victim advocates, and the family of another young woman, Stacy Summers, who was kidnapped three months ago. In the Summers case, video that shows the form but not the face of her kidnapper is still the only evidence they have.
They can tie Crawford to two missing women and, with less certainty, Stacy Summers. Crawford is dead, now, though, so what explains another kidnapping seemingly tied to him? We follow D.D.'s investigation, and Flora's recounting of her own kidnapping, starting with waking up in a coffin-shaped box. Flora's is a harrowing story, and her story and D.D.'s investigation slowly converge on the culprit and the answer from opposite directions.
It is, as always, tightly plotted, with fairly strong characterization.
And yet.
D.D. takes the time to describe what she says is a "traditional Boston triple decker." Unfortunately, she describes it as a three-story home with common rooms on the first floor, and private rooms (bedrooms, etc.) on the second and third floors. In short, a large, single-family home.
No. Just no.
A traditional Boston triple decker is a three-story home, three apartments stacked one on top of the other. Each apartment occupies an entire floor. Common rooms are in the front of the house; bedrooms typically in the back. Each apartment has two porches--one at the front, one at the back.
The triple deckers were Boston's civilized answer to tenement housing, and generations of working class and immigrant families became homeowners by buying triple decker and renting out the other two units.
I whimpered with pain at hearing the triple deckers I and so many others grew up hin described in a way that had nothing to do with them.
Despite my petty personal complaint on that point, this is a good book and an excellent read.
Recommended.
I bought this audiobook.
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