Stolen - Carey Baldwin
 
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“For a moment, he just held her, his hand coasting up and down her back in time with the rhythm of her heart as it beat against his.”
I don’t normally begin a book review with a quotation from the book… but this time I wanted you to know what kind of torture I put myself through to finish Stolen, an installment in the Carey Baldwin romance-mystery Cassidy and Spenser series. Let’s dissect that… stuff: first, “coasting” is a ridiculous verb in this setting. Second, is he really rubbing her back at something like 70 stokes per minute? And third, if her heart is beating against his, the two had better be conjoined twins!
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Laura Chaucer has disappeared for the second time in thirteen years. The first time, the eight-year-old was found near a remote cabin in a Colorado wilderness, the body of her nanny nearby. This time, twenty-one-year-old Laura has awakened in that same cabin, naked, the room awash in blood. She will soon discover that there’s another, eerily similar, dead woman lying nearby…
FBI agent Atticus Spenser and his main squeeze, shrink Caitlin “Caity” Cassidy, are on the case… because Laura’s daddy is a U. S. Senator. Naturally, Caity’s mentor-turned-stalker, Grady Webber, is the Senator’s best bud and Laura’s former psychiatrist. When a tip suggests that Laura is at the cabin again, the team head into the mountains… but Laura isn’t planning on getting caught by her “monster,” so she avoids the search party.
Meanwhile, back in Boulder, Webber shows himself to be a cad and Laura’s mother proves to be a semi-functional alcoholic. It turns out that the dead woman is a friend of Laura’s, but the good guys are convinced that the same person who abducted Laura and killed her nanny is back.
The only suspects are, of course, that smarmy shrink and the guy that Daddy Chaucer hired to be Laura’s bodyguard.
We, of course, know better: in keeping with the mystery writer’s code, the “obvious” suspect won’t be the one, and the real villain will be sitting there in plain sight the whole time. Unlike more competent writers, however, Baldwin forgets to drop even the slightest hint. And that’s all I’m gonna say about that, except that there are so few characters that it’s pretty obvious who the real killer is when you think about it. Why, however is a bizarre twist. Unfathomable, in fact…
That being said, Baldwin’s work suffers from many small problems, among them the whole “timeline” thing. While Chaucer’s father is constitutionally qualified to be a senator, at about 42 he’s remarkably young to hold the office. We’ll let that slide, though.
What we won’t let slide are such factual problems as 1) Mountain lions rarely eat carrion they didn’t kill themselves, and when they do, don’t attack humans to protect it – especially in autumn when food is plentiful. 2) There are no ATV trails in wilderness areas. 3) Anyone who has actually completed a wilderness survival course will not head uphill when lost in the mountains. 4) High-country cabins don't have basements and trunks full of discarded hiking gear and food. Sheesh! 5) Only sadistic parents would name a daughter “Truella Underland.” 6) Is it just me, or is Laura too "fragile" to be out in public in the first place?
Finally, we have Baldwin’s weird relationship with time: Caity screams when a mountain lion charges her, and “The wind carried a faint cry to Spenser.” Even running at “full tilt,” no way could someone cover enough distance for a cry to have been “faint,” yet come upon a woman (even one with 36-D breasts¹) wrestling with a mountain lion only to see her survive with a few cuts. Yeah, right.
After that ridiculous passage, I almost gave up on Stolen, but I stuck it out so I could warn other people. Although the book has a five-star rating at the river, most of the high ratings are from reviewers who gush about the relationship. Sorry, folks, as a romance this is merely average. As a mystery, it’s distinctly lousy. Two stars – and that’s me being generous.
¹ Baldwin put that in there, not me.
copyright © 2021 scmrak
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