THE TAKEN GIRLS, Glenn Cooper thriller in his classic mode

THE TAKEN GIRLS
GLENN COOPER
Lascaux Media (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 paperback, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: From Glenn Cooper, the internationally bestselling author of the Cal Donovan thrillers, comes a gripping thriller of kidnapping, conspiracy, and what powerful men will do to hold on to what they have.

Two little girls vanish from a villa on the Calabrian coast—Victoria, five, and Elizabeth, eight, sisters, the granddaughters of an American billionaire. It looks at first like a kidnapping for ransom.

But no demand ever comes. No ransom means no one wanted money—they wanted the girls.

Years pass. Their grandmother's hair goes white. And then, on an ordinary afternoon, the girls come home. Victoria is still five. Elizabeth is still eight. The same faces, the same small hands—not a day older than the night they disappeared, and dying of something no child should carry.

Everyone wants a story that lets them sleep. The Vatican opens a quiet file on a miracle. The tabloids sell something stranger. But one man keeps pulling the thread everyone wants left alone—until it leads to an old Spanish estate, and to what the powerful will do to hold on to what they have.

Victoria and Elizabeth were not the first children taken. And they are still collecting.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: It's never aliens. Or god. Never.

Just like the only monsters are people. For something to be SUPERnatural, we'd need to know everything that could ever happen naturally. A glance at the news will tell you we do not know everything that could happen naturally. So reading his very complex puzzle-box of a story was an exercise in seeing if the author could get me to the end without making me feel I'd been treated like a mushroom. (Kept in the dark and fed a lot of shit.)

I've read several of the author's religious-themed stories before, and found them like this one: Pleasantly diverting. I do wish he'd stop writing female characters, or take a sensitivity course...they're ciphers or stereotypes.

The patriarch who hires our omnicompetent investigator grated on my nerves. Marcus, said investigator, doesn't put a foot wrong that does not, in the end, result in the solution being moved forward. It's a bit annoying, but in line with most books in this chase-thriller genre. By the midpoint of the story there was a clutter of problems that were either going to get solved or niggle at me as unfinished business; nothing got left behind but it made the ending a breathless rush. That's fine for me but y'all who prefer endings that peel back layers will not enjoy it because it will feel rushed. I myownself would say it's calculatedly fast-paced, but that'a a poTAYto poTAHto argument I've found is not worth anyone's time getting into.

It was a read that engaged me but gave me no one to root for because the people were believably shitty. It's a good distraction that will never play games with your trust, people you don't like don't suddenly turn out to be sweetness and light playing a role (a trope I abhor) or suddenly doing other about-faces. The story resolves in line with its parameters only not quite so simply as one is led to expect. Nice work on that, Glenn Cooper!

ESPERANCE, alt-hist/many-worlds Chicago noir thriller

ESPERANCE
ADAM OYEBANJI
DAW Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$16.99 ebook, available tomorrow

Finalist for the 2025 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science Fiction!

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The history-bending speculative fiction from Adam Oyebanji, award-winning author of BRAKING DAY.

An impossible death: Detective Ethan Krol has been called to the scene of a baffling murder: a man and his son, who appear to have been drowned in sea-water. But the nearest ocean is a thousand miles away.

An improbable story: Hollie Rogers doesn’t want to ask too many questions of her new friend, Abi Eniola. Abi claims to be an ordinary woman from Nigeria, but her high-tech gadgets and extraordinary physical abilities suggest she’s not telling the whole truth.

An incredible quest: As Ethan’s investigation begins to point towards Abi, Hollie’s fears mount. For Abi is very much not who she seems. And it won’t be long before Ethan and Hollie find themselves playing a part in a story that spans cultures, continents… and centuries.

An extraordinary speculative thriller about the scars left by the Atlantic slave-trade, by a master of the genre.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Why you're reading this story will largely color your response to it. SFF readers might not vibe with the very significant police-procedural elements narrated by noirish Ethan the cop. Mystery readers might not love the time-travel, in the many-worlds sense, done by Abi the morally grey alternating PoV.

I'm the reader with a foot and nine toes in each of those camps, plus another entire foot in the alternate-history camp. (There are so three feet! Where? In between worlds where the vibrational body exists and has access to all body parts. Quit quibbling, this has two guys who drowned in the ocean discovered dead in their Chicago apartment!)

I'm so glad to read a thriller inflected with quantum reality, which I am all about in my reading. It felt a bit like Author Oyebanji decided this would be his book, and spent his time plotting the story to the detriment of developing either Abi or Ethan more fully. I'm okay with that because the resolution to the crime we're here to read about was so exactly aimed at me and my personal hobbyhorses. I disliked the detective Ethan's racism being foregrounded. It didn't cause any stars to disappear, but it did make me squirm. As I think that was the point of including it, I mention the fact of it for reader guidance.

Abi's intriguing back/foreground was something I'd read a whole book about all by itself. Hollie, the sidekick, was so pathetically enamored of Abi that it got a little uncomfortable. I mean, I totally get it, and I was a little bit there, too. /but really cringe, Author Oyebanji, in that last bit about gbese.

What the gestalt of the book did not have, as I mentioned above, feels as though it was designed out by the author to leave the fundamental rocks under the story...not revenge, not even forgiveness can leach sin clean...in brightest contrast. It worked for me, I think it might work for all y'all who like your stories sleek, clear, and propulsively paced.

Four and a half shiny, happy stars.

LIGHT YEARS FROM HOME, a poignant story of the cost of being where you fit not belong

LIGHT YEARS FROM HOME
MIKE CHEN
MIRA Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$12.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Every family has issues. Most can’t blame them on extraterrestrials.

Evie Shao and her sister, Kass, aren’t on speaking terms. Fifteen years ago on a family camping trip, their father and brother vanished. Their dad turned up days later, dehydrated and confused—and convinced he'd been abducted by aliens. Their brother, Jakob, remained missing. The women dealt with it very differently. Kass, suspecting her college-dropout twin simply ran off, became the rock of the family. Evie traded academics to pursue alien conspiracy theories, always looking for Jakob.

When Evie's UFO network uncovers a new event, she goes to investigate. And discovers Jakob is back. He's different—older, stranger, and talking of an intergalactic war—but the tensions between the siblings haven't changed at all. If the family is going to come together to help Jakob, then Kass and Evie are going to have to fix their issues, and fast. Because the FBI is after Jakob, and if their brother is telling the truth, possibly an entire space armada, too.

The perfect combination of action, imagination and heart, Light Years From Home is a touching drama about a challenge as difficult as saving the galaxy: making peace with your family…and yourself.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Every damn word of this is so heartfelt, so honest and so completely resonant with my Kassie-like self that I feel like a rotter for not giving it that fourth star. But yet again, sexuality (Evie's probably Lesbian or Bisexual) is window-dressed onto an otherwise complete character. Please stop doing that.

When Arnold, the family patriarch (and doesn't he just know it!) disappears with Jakob, the underperforming (according to Arnold) son, the whole family flies into a state of emergency! Then Arnold comes back from that camping trip, without Jakob, but with a Purpose: Find him and bring him home.

No matter what, no matter who gets hurt or slighted.

So the family is broken again, not re-broken but the existing broken structure is smashed on a new rock. That rock is a vanished son...who returns one day! But what baggage he drags...and what a life he's led...and what his sisters had to put up with...and what they're coping with now.... And, as I am sure you've tipped to by now, this isn't a seamless, straight-through narrative. There are flashbacks!

Every single soul in this narrative has reasons for what they have done that do not depend on what the others did or didn't do. However, as in all toxic families, they blame each other publicly and themselves privately. Jakob made it easy for his twin sister to avoid the tough parts of growing up by leaving her the job of fulfilling the family's expectations. That'll make anyone angry! His little sister, growing up in the vacancy left by a father whose obsession with his lost son is all-consuming, opts out of sane, mainstream society...and this puts yet more pressure on her older sister. Then, wouldn't you just know, Dad dies! And Mom gets dementia!

I think it was around here that I went inside my emotional hidey-hole for a while. It's a lot. I related to Kassie. I was angry with Jakob for...vanishing...without a word. (I mean, come on! He can come back now, but he couldn't send some sort of interplanetary post card? "Having a wonderful war, be glad you aren't here" or something?) But that doesn't put the blame on him, Kassie, the way you want it to...you chose your path, and everyone has choices. Yes, some are harder to make than others, but they're still within the realm of possibility. A thing you, in your faithlessness, have every reason to know....

So this is sci fi? Well...yyyeeesss, but in a curious way no. It's what happens in the space opera between the acts. The messy human bits of the story that get elided over when you're telling the Ultimate Battle of Good Versus Evil!!! and the Hero is tasked with getting {thing} from his home, and whee! he comes back with {thing} and a story about his father being dead. Well, this is what actually happened then!

What makes the story compulsively readable for me is that quality, that interstitial nature. I am always interested in what occurs between the acts. I was not as interested in the seemingly grafted-on piece about the FBI thinking Jakob had run off to become a terrorist...Jakob?! lazy schlub that he was?!...but I can see how it felt timely for young Mister Shao to be branded as something he clearly could never bring himself to be. In a very odd way, though, I guess he did become a violent actor. Just not on Earth. Which, funnily enough, makes it okay...? Or does it?

Kassie's point-of-view narration is cringe-inducingly spot-on for the judgmental left-behind Responsible One's angle. It wasn't fun for me, but it was so real that at times I had to go look and make sure I was still an old, white man and hadn't transmogrified into Kassie Shao. So well done, Author Chen...sort of.

I don't think for a minute that the sci-fi elements will pass muster among the die-hard fans of the genre. They really aren't made for those readers. So if you're a hard SF reader, don't come here with those expectations. This is the moving, affecting, real story of one family's emotional dysfunction over the course of fifteen long, hard, lonely years of alienation and isolation, and the reason for it is science-fictional in nature.

I honestly wondered why I was so caught up in this family cess pit when the Universe is in danger out there! The first part makes you believe that Jakob's quest is URGENT and REAL and then...his sisters kludge onto him, Evie in a credulous, uncritical way and Kassie with her trademark judgment and blame (and she's a therapist?! Yikes), and suddenly it's possible that this is reality and Jakob's just not in it with us.

It gave my reading a focus, a real sense of the stakes, for the story to be presented in this way, though I would've predicted it to have been otherwise. Author Chen's work, which I've been reading for years now, has always made itself a home on my devices because he visibly grows with each published work. I haven't always liked his growing pains, but I appreciate that he is clear about what it is he needs to do and always tries to do it better every time. That he succeeds is a testament to his talent.