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The Girls She Left Behind    by Sarah Graves Amazon.com order for
Girls She Left Behind
by Sarah Graves
Order:  USA  Can
Bantam, 2016 (2016)
Hardcover, CD, e-Book
* * *   Reviewed by Hilary Williamson

In The Girls She Left Behind by Sarah Graves, ex–Boston homicide detective Lizzie Snow (who debuted in Winter at the Door) is now a sheriff’s deputy in Maine's Great North Woods. She works for Sheriff Cody Chevrier and often with state cop Dylan Hudson, with whom she had a brief but memorable fling, unaware that he was married at the time.

There's a lot happening in the area. Firefighters are working to control a forest blaze raging near the small town of Bearkill. Tara Wylie, a teen who has a history of running away and reappearing, doesn't come back this time. And kidnapper/rapist Henry Gemerle has escaped from prison and might be in the area - could he have taken Tara?

As the plot thickens, readers are given flashbacks to the time when Gemerle kidnapped and caged three young women, whom he kept and abused for fifteen years. Teen Jane did get away, but kept silent, believing her cousin Cam already dead and fearing for her own safety. When the young women were found and Gemerle imprisoned, what was a guilt-ridden Jane to do about the girls she left behind?

That question, along with anxiety about Tara's fate, pulls readers' interest through this compelling mystery. And the series has an underlying puzzle as well, that of what happened to Lizzie's young niece after her sister was murdered eight years before. That one isn't answered this time around, and the others only are after a violent, edge-of-your-seat finale. This is a series worth following.

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