Lost Girls
Angela Marsons
Lost Girls is the third novel in Angela Marsons's Kim Stone series. So far all the novels have been fast-moving and engaging. They become engaging in part by exploiting a cheap trick, though. They have all been about tormenting little girls. We're talking, like, ten-year-old kids here. Our hero, DI Kim Stone, was herself the object of such abuse as a child -- her schizophrenic mother abused her and her brother (now dead). Subsequently she was in and out of foster homes as a child, some of them institutions in which child abuse was routine. The villains are generally violent psychotics or psychopaths.
OK, look, no normal person can fail to sympathize with a little girl being tormented by a violent psychopath. It's sort of the flip side of a cute kitten video. It's already starting to feel exploitative to me. I really, really hope that as the series proceeds (there are 22 novels) we branch out a bit more.
I will give Marsons this, though: she knows how to construct an intricate plot. Lost Girls, even more than the previous two novels (not counting the prequel First Blood, which I haven't yet read), puts a lot of balls in the air, juggles them skillfully, and manages to catch them all and stack them neatly in the end. This gives me hope that, even if she stops torturing little girls, Marsons will still manage to write a good thriller.
Lost Girls ends up being a sort of exploration of motherhood -- of the lengths a mother will go to for a child. To some extent the theme is parenthood, since fathers also get some attention. But Marsons doesn't get into the heads of the fathers the way she does the mothers.