The Suspect was marketed as a thriller but I think I would lean more towards family drama. I found myself very intrigued at the beginning of the book with finding out what happened with these two eighteen year old girls in Thailand. I don't know about you... but I don't know any parents that would let their teenage daughters travel alone to a place like Thailand.

The other characters fare equally poorly in terms of development. The ‘bad guy’ is a broadly drawn “crooked cop” turned drug addict and successful local investor. The female police chief, central to the story, gets a lot of text but little real development and Pinky’s lover and ex-lover are both muddled and unengaging characters. On the subject of which - unengaging - the sex in this book is beyond boring and mostly exploitive. When two eighteen-year-old girls go missing on their gap year in Thailand, their families are thrust into the international spotlight: desperate, bereft and frantic with worry. THE AUTHOR: My career has taken some surprising twists and turns over the years. I have been a journalist - senior writer at the Daily Mail, news editor at the Daily Telegraph, and chief reporter at The Mail on Sunday, where I won Reporter of the Year at the National Press Awards, gave up my job to volunteer in Sri Lanka and since 2008, have trained and worked with exiled and threatened journalists all over the world. I gobbled this up for few hours -- safely to say that this is, so far, my FAVORITE Robert Crais novel, Cole/Pike notwithstanding.Scott is a good character, but honestly, I needed more of his inner world. I feel that this was a function of this book being too short. I would have liked a longer, more expansive story that took place over a longer time period. While the bond between Scott and Maggie totally sells this book, I would have found it more believable had it taken place over a longer period of time. Such as it was, I loved it. Maggie is such a wonderful companion, and I liked that not only does she help Scott heal, he helps her as well. While I am a cat lady, I also love dogs, and this book made me long to bring home my very own German Shepherd Dog one day soon. Crais shows how important the human animal bond is in society and how therapeutic animals and people can be to each other. Sorry to go on my soapbox. I can't help it because this book really touches on this issue which is so dear to my heart. Kate Waters is a Reporter. Getting the story has always taken priority above all else, including her family. The Suspect explores one of a parent’s worst fear here, however, taking a bit of a different premise to it with the missing children being adult children. They go missing after taking a gap year and traveling to Thailand. I was intrigued right from the start as it played on one of my worst fears of the reality that we can’t keep our adult children safe and the fear of them becoming lost to us. Not only by the dangers around them but also lost to us by not knowing where or how they are really doing. This lead to a very interesting discussion with some of us who shared the same fear. We connected a bit differently to the story then others did. We witness the parents, one of which has seemed to cover for her son, making excuses, granting him his poor behavior even up to the ultimate of protecting him from punishment for his deplorable actions. Other parents allow their eighteen year olds to embark on a trip overseas to a land where danger lurks, while not really knowing the person their daughters travel and spend their time with. The children, or more young adults, make disastrous choices, one to the point of emerging in the drug and alcohol culture and free wheeling her way through a number of men she beds, while the other knowing full well that what she is involved in is absolutely wrong, does nothing to allay her situation. You see, for them, life is a party and that party should never end. One of the young men in the story, drifts into a state of feeling sorry for himself, wallowing in the "my parents pressed me to be successful mantra", while a second young man thrown around a system of various foster homes and parents, becomes a mad human being, a drifter. While all of this seems to be the making of a good book, unfortunately, this outing fell flat.

Thank you to Berkley Publishing Group and to Fiona Barton, for an advanced readers copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review. Scott and Maggie are easy characters to warm to. The story never lets up and you’ll soon find yourself shouting “way to go Maggie” In this book, two eighteen year old girls, Alex and Rosie, go missing in Thailand, during their "gap year".Overall, I finished this one mainly to see how things would turn out, and although I did get my answers, they left me feeling more exasperated than satisfied. Clarice “Pinky” Granum spent most of her youth experimenting with an impressive array of drugs and failing out of various professions, including the police academy. Pinky knows that in the eyes of most people, she's nothing but a screwup—but she doesn't trust most people's opinions anyway. Moreover, she finally has a respectable-enough job as a licensed P.I. working for Rik on his roster of mostly minor cases, like workman's comp, DUIs and bar fights. Rik's shabby office and even shabbier cases are a far cry from the kinds of high-profile criminal matters Pinky became familiar with in the law office of her grandfather, Sandy Stern. But Rik and Pinky feel that Chief Gomez’s case, which has attracted national attention, is their chance to break into the legal big leagues. In short, kids behaving badly, parents behaving badly, plot holes, and a poorly executed resolution left me unsatisfied. But many have loved this book so I'm with the outlier club. WHSmith Blog - Fiona Barton: The Development of Kate Waters and the Decision to Make her an Investigative Journalist I looked down at the dog who nodded as if to say, “Yes, I am enjoying the way you’re scratching my ears but if you touch my guy, I am gonna mess you up.”