Synopsis

Award-winning and Boston Globe bestselling author Hank Phillippi Ryan presents a spine-chilling, heart-wrenching suspense novel that explores a terrifying scenario striking at the heart of every family.

Does a respected adoption agency have a frightening secret? Tipped off by a determined ex-colleague on a desperate quest to find her birth mother, Boston newspaper reporter Jane Ryland begins to suspect that the agency is engaging in the ultimate betrayal—reuniting birth parents with the wrong children.

For detective Jake Brogan and his partner, a young woman’s brutal murder seems a sadly predictable case of domestic violence, one that results in two toddlers being shuttled into the foster care system. Then Jake finds an empty cradle at the murder scene. Where is the baby who should have been sleeping there?

Jane and Jake are soon on a trail full of twists and turns that takes them deep into the heart of a foster care system in crisis and threatens to blow the lid off an adoption agency scandal. When the threatening phone calls start, Jane knows she is on the right track…but with both a killer at large and an infant missing, time is running out….

The Wrong Girl is a riveting novel of familial relationships—both known and unknown—vile greed, senseless murder, and the ultimate in deception. What if you didn’t know the truth about your own family?

The Wrong Girl is the winner of the 2013 Agatha Award for best contemporary novel.

Review

So I have to admit that I got this book a year ago when it came out from the publisher and just now got around to reading it because the 3rd book is out and that is what I am reading right now!  I have way too many books and not enough time, but that is what 2015 will be all about.  Anyway, enough of my rambling!

This is the 2nd in a series and wow what an action packed book! The author does an excellent job of taking 4 story lines and tying them together seamlessly. It was interesting to see how the story came together in the end and it wasn’t quite what I was expecting that is for sure.  There are a quite a few characters to keep up with, but not too hard to do.  I think I connected to the story line about foster children because of a friend of mine that fostered and then adopted 7 children and I think of her every time I hear/read something like this.

I do recall reading the first book and thinking it was ok, but this book definitely tops that one and kept me engaged right until the very end.

We give this book 4 paws up.

About the Author

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN is the on-air investigative reporter for Boston’s NBC affiliate. She’s won 32 EMMYs, 12 Edward R. Murrow awards and dozens of other honors for her ground-breaking journalism. A bestselling author of seven mystery novels, Ryan has won multiple prestigious awards for her crime fiction: three Agathas, the Anthony, Daphne, Macavity, and for THE OTHER WOMAN, the coveted Mary Higgins Clark Award. National reviews have called her a “master at crafting suspenseful mysteries” and “a superb and gifted storyteller.” Her 2013 novel, THE WRONG GIRL, has the extraordinary honor of winning the Agatha Award for Best Contemporary Novel and the Daphne Award for Mainstream Mystery/Suspense, and is a seven-week Boston Globe bestseller.  Her newest hardcover, TRUTH BE TOLD, is a Library Journal Editor’s Pick and RT Book Reviews Top Pick, with starred reviews from Booklist and from Library Journal, which raves, “Drop everything and binge read!”  She’s a founding teacher at Mystery Writers of America University and 2013 president of national Sisters in Crime.

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