The Last Place You Look (The Roxane Weary Mysteries)
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4.0 • 18 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Kinsey Millhone meets Serial: The Last Place You Look is a head-on collision between an allegedly closed case and a tenacious, troubled private investigator who doesn’t know when to quit.
Nobody knows what happened to Sarah Cook. The beautiful blonde teenager disappeared fifteen years ago, the same night her parents were brutally murdered in their suburban Ohio home. Her boyfriend, Brad Stockton—black and from the wrong side of the tracks—was convicted of the murders and is now on death row. Though he’s maintained his innocence all along, the clock is running out. His execution is only weeks away when his devoted sister insists she spied Sarah at an area gas station. Willing to try anything, she hires PI Roxane Weary to look at the case and see if she can locate Sarah.
Brad might be in a bad way, but private investigator Roxane Weary isn’t doing so hot herself. Still reeling from the recent death of her cop father in the line of duty, her main way of dealing with her grief has been working as little and drinking as much as possible. But Roxane finds herself drawn in to the story of Sarah’s vanishing act, especially when she links the disappearance to one of her father’s unsolved murder cases involving another teen girl.
The stakes get higher as Roxane discovers that the two girls may not be the only blonde teenagers who’ve turned up missing or dead. As her investigation gets darker, Roxane will have to risk everything to find the truth. Lives depend on her cracking this case—hers included.
Customer Reviews
Dysfunctional
The story is about a private investigator who gets hired to -essentially- help prove the innocence of a young, black man convicted of murder. His execution is in a matter of weeks.
This is not the main focus of the story unfortunately. It becomes peripheral.
The main character is written as a deeply flawed human. We are to understand that she is grieving from her father’s murder while in the line of duty, Involved in at least 2 failing relationships, an unstable alcoholic with an uncomfortably dysfunctional family (that we get to go to Sunday dinner with). But!! She is remarkably good at finding things.
If all of the side relationships, characters and back story moved the story along, it would have been interesting. But they don’t. Despite lots of time spent with angry brothers and a distant mom- they have no impact on the story. There is a long term on/off girlfriend/Narcissist who comes in and out of the story only to make the main character look shallow or weak. She is sleeping with her father’s old partner, which gave me major creeps. And she’s drinking constantly, blacking out at times, which made me doubt the realism of her actually following clues.
There is an entire police force that hounds her and gets in the way of her investigation.
All of this slog- uncomfortable situations and frustrations- and the origin of the story gets lost. There is significantly more information about the narcissist girlfriend than there is about the wrongly convicted man.
I found myself wishing the story was over. I didn’t like anyone. The main character wasn’t just troubled, she was unappealing.
I’d rate it 2.5 stars for being a well written but poorly planned story.