Review: The Secrets They Left Behind By Lissa Marie Redmond #WNYAuthor

Amazon

Three missing girls, no leads, a vault of dark secrets, and a case that's getting chillier by the minute, set the stage for this nail-biting procedural from former cold case homicide detective and acclaimed author Lissa Marie Redmond.

Three college freshmen go missing from their rural hometown of Kelly's Falls while on Christmas break. Their cell phones, coats, and purses are left behind, but the girls have disappeared without a trace. As the days turn into weeks and the investigation grows cold, twenty-three year old Buffalo police officer Shea O'Connor is called on to dig up leads undercover.

Still bearing the emotional and physical scars of a previous case, O'Connor infiltrates as eighteen-year-old Shea Anderson, a college freshman and the "niece" of the town's police chief. As she begins to immerse herself in the missing girls' world, befriending their friends and family, and doing whatever it takes to maintain her cover, O'Connor realizes the track is far colder than she initially thought. But whoever was behind the girls' disappearance was only warming up, and they have set their crosshairs directly on her.

The heat is on for O'Connor as she closes in on the shocking truth about what really happened the night the girls vanished. 

https://lissamarieredmond.com/
https://www.facebook.com/LissaMarieRedmond/

Lissa Marie Redmond is a retired cold case homicide detective from Buffalo, NY. She handled a number of high-profile cases and has appeared on numerous television shows including Dateline and Murder by Numbers. The first book in her Cold Case Investigation series, A Cold Day in Hell was published in February by Midnight Ink Books. Her short fiction has appeared in Buffalo Noir, Down & Out: The Magazine, and other publications. A member of Sisters in Crime, she lives in Buffalo with her family and one ungrateful cat.

The Secrets They Left Behind 

By Lissa Marie Redmond

Review by Heidi Lynn's Book Reviews

First, I want to thank Lissa Marie Redmond for providing me with this book so I can bring you this review.

The Secrets They Left Behind is an incredible mystery by WNY’s own Lissa Marie Redmond. She even takes you inside her hometown of Buffalo, NY to show you the sites. This way, if you ever do come to Buffalo, NY you would be able to identify where you were in comparison to the story. 

Along with Buffalo, NY she also names places like Alfred State, Rochester, NY, RIT, Erie Community College West Campus.

There were some very comical scene’s in this book and mostly poking fun at Buffalo. How as a single person this day an age in Buffalo have a shallow dating pool to choose from? Being a single woman myself I can totally back up that statement.

I have always been a fan of mysteries especially those involving missing people or abductions. This story had an incredibly different twist than the other missing persons stories I was used to. The 23-year-old detective goes undercover as Shea (a fellow college student) to find out what happened to those girls that one night.

While undercover we learn so much about the girls and the secrets that they did keep. One secret that was revealed to Shea in confidence I was incredibly happy for. The pressure for teens to be perfect for their families and peers can be very overwhelming. Others mold them into what they want us to be but not exactly who we are. For this character to do what she did to be her true self I commended her.

What a nice change of pace for Nick to ask Shea to attend Church with him as a date. She was used to having guys sending her dick pictures-not this.