Since 2012, I've known a couple of things about Owen Laukkanen -- he can write engrossing thrillers and he can fill them with compelling characters. He's proven it again and again and again. Either one of those traits would likely keep me coming back for more, but you put the two of them together? Fughetaboudit. So when I read the premise for Deception Cove I figured I was in for a treat.

Boy howdy.

So, Jess Winslow is a multi-tour Afghanistan Vet, one more Marine with PTSD and too many memories that will haunt her dreams (and waking life). She's sent home after word comes that her husband's died, but isn't really ready for civilian life. She gets a service dog, Lucy, and tries to move home. Sadly, her dead husband was desperate to better their circumstances and made some very foolish and criminal choices. One of these choices put her husband in the crosshairs of the corrupt local deputy sheriff (and soon to be corrupt local sheriff). Now that he's gone, the deputy focuses on Jess -- she has something he wants (don't ask her what or where it is), and he'll try to break her until she gives it to him. For starters, he takes Lucy from her, exaggerates the circumstances and severity of her biting him and schedules her destruction.

On the other side of the country, a convicted felon is released from prison, after spending about half of his life there. He's not one of those who claims he was innocent, he knows what he did and takes full responsibility for it. But he's paid his debt to society and wants to try to build something. The first thing he does outside of prison is to contact the people behind a dog training program he'd been a part of. He'd spent months training Lucy, getting her to trust him and getting her ready to help out someone like Jess. When Mason hears that Lucy's about to be put down, he can't believe it. He refuses to believe his girl would attack someone and wants to find out what happened. He borrows money from his sister and takes a bus from Michigan to the end of the road in Washington to see what's going on.

Jess and Mason form an uneasy alliance -- Mason only wanting to help Lucy (but he knows helping Jess helps Lucy), and Jess is unable to trust anyone, but knows she needs help saving Lucy (and maybe herself). They set out to find out what her husband took from the criminals the deputy works for, where he hid it and how they can get out of this jam intact. They're not out to set things right, they're not trying to bring criminals to justice (they're not against it, don't get me wrong), they don't even care about vengeance -- they just want to survive.

I'm not going to spend a lot of time on the corrupt deputy and his flunkies -- or the people they all work for -- but a quick word. They feel very real, high school bullies who find themselves in positions of adult power, and no reason to act any differently. Big fish in a small pond, but who want something better. Like Jess' husband, they make some foolish and wrong choices to get that. It's understandable that they find themselves in the situation they're in, but that doesn't excuse their actions for a moment. Beyond that, you really need to see Laukkanen's treatment and development of them.

Laukkanen has pulled a Bradley Cooper and cast his own dog, Lucy, as the common ground for these two characters. It's easy to see why. She's a good girl, one of the best, but she's not a super-dog (no offense to Walt Longmire's Dog or Peter Ash's Mingus). She gets scared, and runs from danger. But she's loyal, and knows what Jess needs from her. And she knows a creep when she sees/smells one.

I want to pause for a moment and say, yeah, this hits some similar beats to Spencer Quinn's The Right Side -- an injured Vet who finds herself helped by a dog as she struggles with civilian life -- and some small town injustice. But Jess and LeAnne are very different women -- as Goody and Lucy are very different dogs -- and their situations aren't the same. But if you liked one of these novels, you should check out the other.

Yes, a lot of this book plays out the way you know it will from the description. But not all of it. More than once, Laukkanen will make you say, "Wait--what?" But even better, you will keep turning the pages as fast as you can, absolutely riveted -- even during the largely predictable parts. That's no mean feat, but Laukkanen will make it look easy (note the use of the word "largely" -- none of it is as predictable as you think, and the plot takes some unanticipated turns). More than anything, you will care about this odd pair and the canine glue that holds them together.

The last chapter just seals things for me -- great ending. It's not like I was on the fence about whether I liked the book or not, because I did. It's not even something that made me like the book more -- it's more like it ratified my opinion. "You know all the positive thoughts and inclinations you had about this book? Well, guess what, Sparky? You were right."

From the setup to the execution and all points in between, Deception Cove delivers the goods. Anyone who read just one of his Stevens and Windermere books knows that Laukkanen can write a compelling thriller with great characters. In these pages, he shows that in spades -- you take a couple of characters that could easily be cardboard cutouts and instead makes them three-dimensional people with depth, flaws, and a relatability -- and throw them into a great thriller. What more could anyone want? A wonderful dog. Guess what? He's got one of those, too. Leaving the reader wanting little more than a sequel. Go, get this one.

If you like seafaring stories this is a great one to read. It's action packed and pretty much the entire story is set out on the water, in either the tugboat or car carrier.

I really wish they would make this into a series. I'd love to go on more salvages with the Gale Force crew.

*I received this ARC from the Penguin Random House First-to-Read program in exchange for an honest review. Thank you!

I'm really of two minds about this one -- it was a pretty rock-solid thriller, full of suspense and all the other things you want in a book about a serial killer being hunted down over several states. On the other hand, it's a lousy Stevens & Windermere novel -- it could have literally been any other detectives/agents/maverick cops and the book would've played out the same way.

For years -- women who no one will miss, women who are pretty much expected to leave town at any moment -- have been the target of "the rider." He's a presence -- some would say an Urban Legend -- on the "High Line" (a railroad route in Montana, Idaho, Washington), and is responsible for the deaths of many: small town waitresses, prostitutes, runaways, train hoppers. Since these women weren't noticed by many, were expected to be seeking opportunities out of the small towns they live in, and so on -- no one raises a fuss over their disappearances (or the eventual discovery of their remains after the snow abates. A girl named Ash feels like she has to ignore the warnings about the High Line to make it somewhere in record time. She becomes one of "the riders"' victims -- her friend decides to get a little vengeance and goes off to hunt "the ride" and make sure no one else forgets these women.

About the same time, Stevens and Windermere learn about Ash's murder -- and soon the begin to learn about others. So while Mathers stays home to handle the technical and research portions of the investigation, the agents hit the road to dig up some better clues.

What I liked: the suspense, the way that Laukkanen told the story (although I admit having a little trouble keeping names straight at the beginning) -- bouncing between perspectives while ratcheting up the suspense. I'm not always the biggest fan of this maneuver, but Laukkanen nailed it. The world -- the culture of train hopping -- was fascinating, and I'm willing to bet really well researched and pretty based in reality. Overall, it's not the best thriller I've read lately, but it was very satisfying.

What I didn't like: as I said, it could've been the most generic pairing of a male/female FBI agents on the hunt for this killer. Until maybe the last 50 pages -- but even then, it didn't need to be Kirk Stevens or Carla Windermere, but it made it easier to handle the emotional beats for them to be the central characters. Also, while I absolutely bought the killer, his motivation, his twisted way of thinking -- but when he was responding to questions, explaining himself? Ugh. He sounded like he was reading off of a list of sexual predator prejudices from Wikipedia. Honestly, you take out that one segment where he's responding to questions about his motivation and the whole book is better.

I'm still planning on reading whatever Laukkanen puts out for the next 5< years, don't misunderstand me. This one just didn't work for me the way I'd hoped. Not a bad book -- just a bad seines entry.

Dedicated to the victims of a serial killer in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, The Forgotten Girls by Owen Laukkanen is a police procedural that starts with gruesome pictures on a phone and ends with the hunt for a serial killer. It follows the police chase both from the perspective of the detectives, the girls, and the killer - "the ghost rider." The book is a fiction with a reminder that these things sadly do also happen in real life.

Reviewed for Penguin First to Read program.

Not too long after the events of <b>The Stolen Ones</b>, a classmate of Kirk Stevens' daughter, Andrea, a victim of bullying and neglect, kills himself. Andrea wants justice for the classmate -- she wants the bullies punished, she wants the message to go forth that this kind of thing can't happen, and she wants her father to insure that happens. He sympathizes, he even empathizes, but he really can't do anything. But he pokes around a little bit -- and he and Carla Windermere discover that there was a suicide pact -- that some girl in Philly is supposed to be killing herself now, too.

They may not be able to do anything for the dead boy, but they can try to keep this girl alive.

Only . . . there is no girl. Or at least, she isn't who she said she was. Mental alarm bells start going off, and the two agent soon figure out that there's one person out there online, posing as a concerned stranger, helping others to commit suicide -- maybe even talking them into it, for whatever reason they might have. Once you start to learn the reason, you become convinced that this person is a certain level of despicable.

The original suicide brought up a lot of memories for Carla -- things she'd tried to forget from her school days. She throws herself into this investigation, putting even more pressure on herself than usual. She talks to her partner and her boyfriend less, develops a shorter fuse, and drinks and smokes worse than she usually does. She also refuses to tell anyone what's going on == she'll only say she's trying to save kids' lives.

The two start traveling the country, learning more about certain types of online forums than anyone should know, trying to hunt down their suspect before he/she gets talks another teen into making a mortal choice. The novel has breakneck pace, and enough twists to keep you engaged -- all of which is good.

Because of the focus on Windermere, and the pressing nature of the investigation (not that their other cases have been leisurely), we spent absolutely no time with the Stevens family after Andrea brought a witness to her father. That's just strange -- granted, it wasn't until after I was finished with the novel that I realized we hadn't spent time with them -- but I knew <i>some</i>thing was missing. The Stevens gang has been such a fixture for at least a few chapters in these books, to not have them is jarring. But we did get a lot of time with Carla and Mathers -- actually about the same as usual (maybe less). But in comparison, we got a lot more. Still, the lack of personal lives in this novel drove home two things -- the urgency Carla felt, and the weight of the rest of the emotions/regrets/anger she was dealing with.

This is the second novel in the last half-year that I've read dealing with people being talked into suicide. Both very different, both compelling in their own rights -- this was a tad more believable, really. Still, I hope this isn't a trend that continues.

I couldn't believe how quickly I sped through this -- not just because Laukkanen writes with lean, confident prose, but it was the characters, the plot -- you read this and you just have to know how it turns out (okay, sure, you are rightly convinced that Kirk and Carla will get their man -- but how, and what the body count will be along the way, that's the question). Yeah, the weakest of the 5, but it was satisfying, entertaining and engaging. Good enough for me, and enough to keep me coming back for more.