Finding Ruby Draker by Marianne Scott

Genre: Mystery / Thriller

Publisher: Friesen Press

Synopsis

Kathleen Jones has lived a protected and typical suburban life, nothing unexpected in her carefully controlled and planned existence. She’s about to complete her college degree and is ready to start a successful career but after completing her last exam she comes home to find her world has been turned upside down. Her home has been torched and her parents and little brother killed.

If that’s not bad enough, she is kidnapped and drugged unconscious by strangers posing as a police officers. When she awakes she discovers that everything has changed – her face, her name, and everything she believed to be true.

But things get worse. Hardly recovered from surgery, she is whisked away under the cover of darkness as more men storm the clinic with guns. It seems that the men who abducted her are not her greatest threat. Now on a private charter on its way to Nice, France, her abductors are calling her Ruby – Ruby Draker!

Finding Ruby Draker is a novel about knowing yourself, accepting change, embracing danger, and taking risks. You never know what life is going to throw at you.

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Review

This action-packed thriller will keep you on the edge of your seats about what could possibly happen next for the Draker family. It moves at a pretty steady clip, so stay alert because you never know what curve might come next.

The book starts out and we discover Kathleen has been kidnapped after arriving back home to discover her home on fire and her family has perished. It takes quite some time for her to understand what is going on and why these people took her and gave her plastic surgery. I felt her frustration not getting answers or understanding about the situation. To top it off, once she is whisked away to another country, she still doesn’t get answers and there are these people that say they are her parents and siblings. They aren’t according to what Kathleen, now Ruby, remembers of her life. I thought it was odd that they took so long to fill her in on why she was there. In fact, she doesn’t learn the whole truth for quite some time. Perhaps it is a test, but if you take someone from their home surely you would provide them with some information.

Once Ruby is in the know, the story picks up speed because they are off to try and save some people from suffering the same fate as Ruby’s parents and the other residents of this estate. You won’t learn everyone’s situation right off the bat, some are not shared until near the end of the book. But the stories intertwine and the Draker’s pick up some others along the way that they knew from the past. Turns out this is a cold war situation that should have ended but one character continues the fight. This antagonist has a lot up his sleeve when it comes to this family and I kept wondering how he was able to stay one step ahead of them in most situations.

The story is long but there is not a lot of downtime for the characters and everything they do has a reason. I enjoyed the twists and turns and how prepared the Draker family was throughout the whole book. I can’t imagine trying to save others and protect your secret as well. And the story of how they have their estate was a nice little twist from what you might expect. There is even a potential love interest for Ruby with a very bizarre love triangle near the end with grave consequences.

While you might have to suspend reality in some places, this is a solid book and one that I enjoyed. I was sad that some of the family doesn’t survive, but it is what leads us to the next book and where life will take them next.

We give this book 4 paws up.

Read the 2nd Book in this Series

Ruby Draker has found new strength and is ready to move on after Felix Szabo devastated the Draker estate in Nice, France. Three Drakers are dead leaving Ruby in grief and with thoughts of revenge. The Drakers are a family built of survivors; each rescued from Felix Szabo, a psychopath, who sought to murder his former agents at the CIA whom he believed betrayed him. The Drakers’ sole mission is to stop Szabo from adding more victims to his list, and although he also perished during the invasion, his legacy continues to haunt them. When the Drakers learn that Robert Draker, presumed dead since the shoot-out at Robert’s farmhouse, may be alive and at a rehab clinic in Portland, Maine, the Drakers know it could be a setup, but they have no choice but to try to nd him and bring Robert home.

​Shocked that Robert may be alive, the family head from France to America to find him. It’s only when they arrive in the west that they realize finding Robert won’t be as easy as they thought. Szabo has found a way to terrorize the Draker family, even after death. His outstanding debt with a Corsican crime family means the Drakers must now find and deliver a shipment of plutonium, which will likely be used by terrorists to create a nuclear bomb, to get Robert back. As Ruby struggles with the decision to save her brother or North America, she must also evade the CIA, who are trying to stop the Drakers from delivering the plutonium.

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About the Author

Marianne Scott is the Canadian author of four mystery thrillers and is currently finishing an edit on her fourth novel, a murder mystery. She has a BA and a Diploma in Business Administration from Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, CA. She studied creative writing through Conestoga College and Humber College. She enjoys writing workshops such as those offered by Brian Henry, publisher of the blog, Quick Brown Fox, and One Lit Place, a writers’ hub by creator/editor Jenna Kalinsky. She has an author’s website and blog is the president of The Cambridge Writers’ Collective and is a member of the Guelph Genre Writers. In September of 2018, she completed a fourth-year course in Writing Fiction at the University of Guelph under the expert teaching of Lawrence Hill. Her novels, Finding Ruby Draker and Shadows in the Aftermath are self-published. She is actively seeking representation to break into the traditional publishing world with her third and fourth novels.

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Giveaway

Win paperback copies of both FINDING RUBY DRAKER and SHADOWS IN THE AFTERMATH (4 winners)

USA only. Ends July 8, 2022

FINDING RUBY DRAKER/SHADOWS IN THE AFTERMATH Book Tour Giveaway