Jennifer McMahon Island of Lost Girls

Island of Lost Girls

Jennifer McMahon

Harper, May 2008, $13.95

ISBN: 9780061445880

While on her way to a job interview in Pike Crossing, Vermont, Rhonda Farr stops at a gas station. While waiting for service, she sees a mother enter a convenience store while her daughter Ernestine talks to a white rabbit who came up to the car. Mesmerized Rhonda freezes while the rabbit takes the little girl with him into another vehicle and drives away. Rhonda snaps out of her paralysis and tells the cops what she witnessed.

Pat of Pat's Mini market where the abduction took place sets up in the store a center to coordinate people who want to find the girl. They get residents to look for her and hang up missing posters; volunteers man tip hotline phones. Rhonda tells her friend Peter what happened; he informs her that he was incommunicado when the rabbit did his deed. The evidence points to Peter as the kidnapper; no matter how hard she tries to reach him, Peter refuses to confide in Rhonda until she gives up on him and goes to the cops. That proves the catalyst for all hell to break loose with Rhonda's life in jeopardy.

As with PROMISE NOT TO TELL, Jennifer McMahon provides a strong suspense thriller with realistic characters whom readers will feel they know. Running parallel with the present investigation are flashbacks to the disappearance of the father of Rhonda's best friend Lizzie in 1993 after wearing a rabbit's costume and three years after that Lizzie. The present crime brings back the as filtered through Rhonda's memories. ISLAND OF LOST GIRL is a tense mystery that grips audience from the initial appearance of the rabbit and never lets go until the readers feels they entered the rabbit's hole.

Harriet Klausner