I have read all of Robert Dugoni‘s legal thrillers and police procedurals, and The Trapped Girl may be the best of them all. The book is the 4th in the series featuring Seattle Homicide Detective Tracy Crosswhite and her A Team of detectives. Mr. Dugoni continues to impress me with his increasingly better writing each time out.
The story begins when a fisherman goes out into Puget Sound to check his illegal crab pot for Dungeness crabs. When he pulls up his pot, he finds, in addition to the crabs, a dead woman. He hauls his grisly find back to the beach at Alki Point in West Seattle and calls the police. Tracy and her team arrive on the scene to begin their investigation.
Along the way, the Seattle Police Department and the Tacoma Police Department get into a jurisdictional dispute. Is the body that of a missing woman reported to the Tacoma PD which is investigating the case? The missing woman from Portland, OR disappeared from a camping trip on Mt. Rainier with her husband, a Portland based lawyer of dubious character. Or is it Seattle’s case because it is a murder?
Typical of Dugoni’s books, the plot twists are many. Tracy travels to Portland and to Southern California trying to solve the crab pot murder. During her investigation there is another missing person, another murder, and $500,000 that has disappeared as well. Her counterpart from Tacoma is an incompetent policeman. A rather large social surprise awaits Tracy during the investigation. The reader learns about several more investigative forensic tools that the author continues to learn about as well.
You will really enjoy reading this mystery.
GO! BUY! READ!
–Jim Harris, retired book sales rep
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Hi! I am looking for a novel set at Mount Rainier to take on a backpacking trip this summer. This looks like a good one, but I’m not sure if enough of the action takes place at Mount Rainier for this to be the right choice. Can you advise? Thanks!
https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780735289543?aff=penguinrandom
https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781570615214