In Rivers’ final thriller of a trilogy, a psychologist takes on a sex trafficking ring in New Mexico that threatens her family.

Kate Medina is a professional therapist with a private practice in her hometown of Alamogordo, New Mexico. She also operates a safehouse for the victims of sex trafficking—a veritable fortress equipped with a panoptic home security system. For decades, a vast and complex sex-trafficking ring has been based in the small city, protected by such high-ranking officials as Bill Gunnison, Alamogordo’s chief of police. However, Medina’s investigations into this corruption, with the help of her fiance, FBI agent Roman Aguilar, have made very little progress. Then Sam Garrett, the city manager, contacts her with a promise of information; this could be a breakthrough, as Kate is certain that he’s a part of the criminal conspiracy. However, before she can speak to him, he’s killed by an unknown assailant. Soon afterward, someone abducts Kate’s sister, Tilly, who’s a nurse, and her teenage friend, Hannah Bross, and Kate fears the worst. Later, she finds out that someone close to her has run the illicit operation for many years and is locked in a power struggle with Gunnison over its leadership. Rivers portrays the harrowing machinations of the sex-trafficking industry with impressive meticulousness, and she sensitively depicts the trauma of sexual assault and its long-term effects on its victims. However, Rivers’ prose, while clear, is bland and prone to melodrama (“Would any of them ever be the same?”), which can be jarring, given the gravity of the subject matter. As a result, readers may find it difficult to become fully engaged in the action of the novel. Also, as this is the series’ final installment, newcomers won’t be able to fully appreciate it without reading its predecessors first.

An intelligently conceived novel, hampered by prose of uneven quality.

A psychologist attempts to uncover a sex trafficking ring while wrestling with trauma in Rivers’ thriller sequel.

After discovering a criminal conspiracy in her small town, Alamogordo, New Mexico, in Complicit (2021), Kate Medina is compelled to restart her life after losing her job as a high school psychologist. To that end, she remodels her desert home so that it’s all but impregnable, like an “old-time fortress.” She’s overwhelmed by fearful anxiety that sex traffickers in her town will eventually attempt to silence her; prominent businessman Allen Parks, one of them, pays her a menacing visit, chillingly depicted by the author. Kate establishes her own private practice, and while she’s hesitant to mine her clients for information, she keeps picking up clues that point to the conspiracy’s ringleaders. She begins to suspect that her mother’s death was not, as she once thought, an accident and may be connected to her knowledge of the criminal underbelly of Alamogordo. Meanwhile, Kate’s sister, Tilly, moves back to town and struggles with trauma related to past sexual abuse; she decides to use herself as bait to capture a serial rapist. Rivers paints an artfully disturbing portrait of a dark world of criminality that’s as ubiquitous as it is invisible—one in which respected and powerful people prey upon the town’s vulnerable youth. The prose is straightforwardly plain and largely shorn of poetical embellishment, although it can veer into cliché at times: “How could she even consider bringing children into a world like this?” However, the novel as a whole radiates a feeling of gloom that’s as entrancing as it is horrifying. It’s the second installment in a series, and although it’s a self-sufficient, stand-alone novel—the reader doesn’t need to read its predecessor to enjoy it—the two stories are so deeply intertwined that it’s best to read both.

An often haunting tale of sinister secrets.

In this thriller series opener, the brutal murder of a teenage girl rocks the students of a New Mexico high school and reconnects their psychological counselor with her former best friend.

Five years ago, after her mother’s tragic death in an automobile accident, forensic psychologist Kate Medina moved back to her family home in Alamogordo to care for her widowed father, Frank. Now, she is working as a counselor in the same school that she attended almost 20 years earlier. It is Friday, and Kate goes home disconcerted. Her session with Mandy Garcia is unproductive, and another student, Gabby Greene, is missing. During a difficult dinner that night with her father and her sister, Tilly, Kate learns that Frank is dying. Tuesday morning, her world turns even darker. She arrives at school to find police Detective Roman Aguilar, the best friend she left behind so long ago, waiting in her office. Gabby’s mangled body has been found in a creek, and the police are assuming the murder is gang related. But Kate and Roman are both chilled by the memory of an eerily similar killing that took place 17 years ago when the two friends discovered the body of a teenage girl in a burned-out car by the creek. Little do Kate and Roman suspect that the ensuing investigation will put their lives in danger. Although the plotline sometimes feels like a cross between an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and a Hallmark Channel movie, Rivers ably tackles the frightening topic of domestic sex trafficking of underage girls by malevolent, powerful men as well as the emotional baggage carried by victims of rape. Not quite a page-turner, the timely novel is nonetheless engrossing, with enough tension and dramatic angst—especially between Kate and Roman—to keep things intriguing. Despite the evasion of justice by too many bad guys, the story leaves hopeful possibilities with plenty of strings to be followed in the sequel. And Kate has the potential to be a sufficiently strong protagonist to carry the series forward.

An engaging tale with a disturbing subject, fraught relationships, and a touch of romance.

A woman wrestling with a dark past travels to her husband’s hometown and discovers that he’s plagued by secrets of his own.

In this novel, Alice Bennett is a successful magazine writer happily married to Will, a handsome, high-priced lawyer. But after she finally discloses unseemly secrets about her past—her father was “an abusive alcoholic” and she struggled with the same addiction—that breach of trust upends her marital bliss. So when her mother-in-law, Mae, is badly injured in a fall, Alice travels to the Georgia mountains to help her recover, an opportunity to curry favor with Will and slowly regain his affection. But as Mae’s memory begins to return—she had suffered a concussion and her recollection of the accident had been hazy—she comes to believe a man intentionally pushed her. Later, Mae’s dog is attacked; her property catches fire; and someone seems to have maliciously tampered with her medication. The police suspect Larry Lee Simms, known as one of the “town bullies” with a penchant for violence and petty crimes, who’s probably responsible for a string of recent burglaries. In addition, the Simms and Bennett families share a long history of unresolved acrimony and have “been at each other’s throats for generations.” As Alice digs deeper into the town’s buried past she learns Will harbors terrible secrets of his own and that his own checkered history is somehow woven into the mysterious danger that threatens Mae. Rivers (Best Laid Plans & Other Disasters, 2017, etc.) artfully conjures a melancholic atmosphere of dread, and the promise of unraveling a skein of closely guarded secrets keeps readers in a state of tantalizing suspense. The novel’s characters are vividly real and portrayed with great psychological nuance and moral sensitivity. But the author’s prose can be clumsily theatrical and sprinkled with clichés: “If looks could kill, he’d have been six feet under.” And she tries far too laboriously to explicitly draw moral edification from her own story, apparently anxious her readers aren’t paying attention: “She’d learned a very real and nearly fatal lesson about keeping secrets.”

An enthralling family drama despite the author’s impulse to overnarrate. 

The female mayor of a small town navigates politics, relationship troubles, and the reality that life doesn’t always go according to plan.

Gwen Marsh’s life looks great on paper, but being the mayor of Cambria takes its toll. She’s under constant scrutiny at work, and there’s also her boyfriend, Jason. She knows something is off, but is unable to pinpoint the source of her unease as they lie in bed at night: “She should have felt calm, settled even. Instead, she felt cold dread....What’s wrong with me?” The strain worsens when Jason’s new job with BGB Pharmaceuticals keeps him away from home for days at a time. Then Gwen finds out that her chronic stomachache is actually an unexpected pregnancy, and it’s make-it-or-break-it time for their already rocky relationship. She debates whether it’s the right time or the right man with whom to start a family. After all, her personal life is never safe from the public eye, and it could interfere with her tidy plan to become the next governor of Colorado. Meanwhile, Jason explores the fine line between friendship and romance with a new co-worker, Alex. She is a well-rounded supporting character, capitalizing on Jason’s kindness and vulnerability. Slightly less developed, but still integral, is Gwen’s colleague Karen, the forefront of the movement to undermine the mayor’s authority. But a plotline involving Evan, a local college student with a schoolboy crush on Gwen, falls a bit flat. Aside from Gwen’s pregnancy, her cousin Val’s upcoming wedding gives the novel a nice sense of forward momentum. Val provides a sounding board for Gwen’s fears about motherhood. When it comes to Gwen and Jason, it’s nice to see a fictional relationship mirror the pitfalls of so many in real life—guilt, bickering, insecurity, lack of communication—but it can be hard to empathize when they spend so much of the novel at odds. Nevertheless, Rivers (Wallflower Blooming, 2016) convincingly creates a world in which the choices that women—and men—must make about career, romance, and family aren’t just theoretical. They’re personal.

Chicken soup for the working woman’s soul.