Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsA promising start but...
Reviewed in Australia on 25 September 2019
"The Trapped Girl" is fourth in author, Robert Dugoni’s Tracy Crosswhite series. The story gets off to a cracking start when a crab fisherman stumbles upon a crab pot in the chilly waters of Puget Sound off Seattle. Trouble is, it wasn’t filled with crabs, but a woman’s body. Tracy and her colleagues at the Seattle Police Department’s Violent Crimes Section are handed the case but have a troubling start when they find it difficult to identify the victim. It appears from her autopsy that she has gone to great lengths to conceal her identity. When evidence comes to light that the unidentified woman could be a person who had disappeared some months earlier, Tracy is haunted by the memory of her own sister’s unsolved murder. One by one the clues are uncovered, but as they are, the mystery seems to deepen. And there’s a shock – and grave danger – for Tracy when the real culprit is eventually identified.
Despite the promising start and an exciting dénouement in "The Trapped Girl", I could not describe this book as a thriller, more a plodding whodunit. I acknowledge and respect Robert Dugoni as a NYT bestselling author but the description on Amazon’s website, “a taut, riveting thriller” just doesn’t cut it for me. There were just too many parts of the narrative sandwiched between the opening and closing parts of the story that had me drifting off to other things jockeying for position in my mind. "The Trapped Girl" is worth a read, but more for lovers of murder/mystery novels.
