Aubrey Nye Hamilton Reviews: Little Girl Lost: A Lucy Black Thriller by Brian McGilloway

 

Little Girl Lost by Irish author Brian McGilloway (Pan Macmillan, 2011) is the first book about Detective Sergeant Lucy Black. Black transfers from the Lisburn police station to the CID unit in County Londonderry to stay closer to her father who suffers from progressively worse dementia. A month into her new job finds the entire force caught up in the search for the missing daughter of a wealthy Derry businessman. During a heavy snowfall a girl is reported in the woods near Prehen and the team is called out to the site. Lucy gets there first and finds a child, not the missing teenager, in soaked pajamas and freezing cold. She does not speak, even to give her name, clinging to Lucy who accompanies her to the hospital.

Because Lucy is the only person who can approach the child without setting off piercing shrieks, the powers that be temporarily assign her to the Public Protection Unit to find the child’s family to her great disappointment. Her new commanding officer seems a decent sort but she can’t help feeling sidelined from the action swirling around the high-profile case of the kidnapped girl.

While Lucy begins calling schools to ask about missing students, the forensics tech looks over the child’s clothing and finds it is covered with a fine spray of blood. Not hers, because she is unhurt beyond hypothermia, but someone else’s. There’s enough to believe the child came from a crime scene somewhere, making the need to identify her more urgent than ever.

An absorbing, complex, and realistic police procedural. The multiple plot threads come together in a surprising way, solving an old crime as they do.

Lucy Black is a wonderful character. Her intelligence, kindness, and determination make her a promising police officer. Anyone who has worked in a bureaucracy will understand her struggles with the politics and the favoritism of the police organization. Her attempts to avoid putting her father into a care facility as he becomes progressively worse are heartbreakingly realistic. Watching her juggle the two as the larger drama of the kidnapping plays out is fascinating. Recommended.

Starred review from Library Journal.

 

·         Publisher: ‎William Morrow Paperbacks

·         Publication date: ‎May 6, 2014

·         Language: ‎English

·         Print length: ‎336 pages

·         ISBN-10: ‎0062336592

·         ISBN-13: ‎978-0062336590

 

Amazon Associate Purchase Link:  https://amzn.to/3WJBYMI

 

Aubrey Nye Hamilton ©2025

Aubrey Hamilton is a former librarian who works on Federal It projects by day and reads mysteries at night.

Aubrey Hamilton Reviews: Dead Man’s Footsteps by Peter James

Dead Man’s Footsteps by Peter James (Pan Macmillan, 2014) is the fourth book in the Detective Superintendent Roy Grace contemporary police procedural series. Based in Brighton, significant parts of the book take place in New York and in Australia.

The story opens with Ronnie Wilson in New York City on 11 September 2001, preparing for an important business meeting in the World Trade Center at 10:00 A.M. A meeting that does not take place for reasons we all know. Wilson is up to his ears in debt and uses the terrorist attacks and subsequent chaos to shed those debts along with his identity. The graphic descriptions of the bombings and their impact on New York City and its residents continue to chill, despite the intervening years.

Then the story focuses on Abby Dawson and her terrifying experience locked in a failed elevator for more than 24 hours. Anyone with the slightest bit of claustrophobia will find this part hard to read.

The story flips to DS Grace on a late Friday afternoon in October 2007, in a foul mood over poker losses the night before and made worse by a call about the skeletal remains found at a building site. The subsequent investigation will consume his weekend along with that of many of his colleagues.

The book moves back and forth in time and in place among Wilson, Dawson, and Grace, disorienting and without clear connection for many chapters until the skeleton is identified as Wilson’s first wife, who was believed to have gone to Los Angeles years before. It’s this lack of clear momentum I think that makes the book slow going for about the first third. It seems to pick up steam about then, as Abby’s role begins to take shape and as Grace’s comprehensively explained detective work comes to the fore.

The authenticity of the detailed police procedures is a hallmark of this series, I gather from many reviews. The portrayal of internal department politics, complete with hateful managers and backstabbing peers, is recognizable to anyone who has worked in a large organization. The socially inept detective whom everyone avoids but just happens to be brilliant at his job is also a character familiar to me in real life.

A fine police procedural, after its slow start, that unfortunately requires a more than normal investment of reading time for its 566 pages. It may well be hard to find as this appears to be another series that is not published in the United States. This review is based on the UK trade paperback released in 2014. The original hardback was published by Macmillan UK in 2008.

·         Trade Paperback: 592 pages

·         Publisher: Pan Macmillan; New edition (October 9, 2014)

·         Language: English

·         ISBN-10: 1447272641

·         ISBN-13: 978-1447272649

Aubrey Hamilton ©2018

Aubrey Hamilton is a former librarian who works on Federal It projects by day and reads mysteries at night.