Sharon Potts, Someone's Watching

Someone's Watching

Oceanview, Feb 7 2011, $25.95

ISBN: 9781608090136

Once a corporate suit, Robbie Ivy works as a bartender in Miami's South Beach section. Her estranged father arrives at the club where she works to ask Robbie for a favor. His other daughter Kaitlin "Kate" Brooks and her BFF Joanne Sparks are missing somewhere in the concrete South Florida jungle; he wants Robbie to help find her.

Robbie is stunned to learn she has a sibling as she had no idea until her dad's visit that she had a half-sister. Not knowing how to start, she asks her former boyfriend, Jeremy Stroeb for advice. He suggests she speak to Detective Judy Lieber who cautions Robbie to watch her step as coeds like Kate are targets of nasty predators especially when Joanne is found dead. Her amateurish inquiry turns deadly as Robbie realizes time is running out on her meeting her younger half-sister alive.

Relationship damaged Robbie makes a terrific protagonist as she hopes to make it with Jeremy, reunite with her father and become friends and sister with her sibling. Thus she has a major impetus to find Kate. Mindful of the exhilarating mindless action movie Taken (even though the heroine is an amateur while Neeson's character Mills is a former CIA field operative). Filled with spins and stunning red herrings, readers will appreciate this engaging, timely but sordid tale of kidnapping teens and forcing them into prostitution (right out of the headlines).

Harriet Klausner