CBR5 - #1 The Year of Fog, Michelle Richmond

I have to confess, I didn't select this book to read myself. It was selected by a member of my book club. I knew as soon as I read the synopsis I was in trouble. This post will be spoilery; consider yourself warned.

I don't read mysteries. Mostly because there are a lot of bad ones out there and I find that once I've read the hook at the beginning of the book, no matter how bad the writing, story, characterization, etc., I end up sticking with it to see if the end is as bad, obvious, surprising, or whatever that I anticipated it being. So, it's a whole lot of time reading something I don't like to get to end I don't care about buy have to know. I  know, I have issues. I'm sure there are lots of great mysteries out there, I just can't take the risk anymore.

And so it is with this book. A 6 year old little girl in the care of her father's fiance is snatched from the beach while said fiance is distracted in the opening 10 pages of the book. The rest of the book is the fiance's experience as she doggedly searches for the little girl she let get away, even after her own father, the police, and everyone else have given up. Just, ugh.

So here are my issues in order:

• How do you get a child out of the country post 9/11 without a passport and the permission of one of her parents?
• How does an ex-addict, ex-wife, who reappears looking to reconcile when he daughter goes missing manage to hide her involvement from the police and yet still get found out by the photographer fiance?
• How does a non-parent of a missing child effectively snatch her right back in a foreign country and manage to get her back state side in a matter of hours with a few phone calls.

But mostly:

There are relationships (lots of them) that with years of foundation and children together collapse under the weight of a missing child. This one is barely getting off the ground, there is nothing to suggest that the bond is any greater than any other year-old romance, and yet they muscle through 95% of the novel in a way that is totally UNBELIEVABLE. SHE LOST HIS CHILD while taking pictures on the first ever trip where he left them alone together. I could not get passed the fact that I didn't believe he would be in the same room with her let alone wanting to move on and marry her before the child was located.

All of those things aside, it's mostly a boring account of the protagonist walking the streets of San Francisco. I hate to give a book a bad review, but this book was just too much.