A missing daughter, a family with secrets, a race for the truth…
SEARCH FOR HER
by Rick Mofina
Mira Books/HarperCollins, March 2021
(chez Lorella Belli – voir catalogue)
At a truck stop near Las Vegas, fourteen-year-old Riley Jarrett vanishes from her family’s RV, turning their cross-country dream of starting over into a nightmare. Investigators have their work cut out for them. The massive, bustling truck plaza in the desert is the perfect place for someone to disappear—or be taken. Detectives pursue every chilling lead as all eyes fall to the newly blended family with a tragic past. With the clock ticking down on the likelihood that Riley’s alive, suspicions run deep. Everyone—from Riley’s mom to her stepdad to her stepbrother and her ex-boyfriend—has something to hide. And their secrets could prove deadly.
Rick Mofina is a former crime reporter and the award-winning author of several acclaimed thrillers. He’s interviewed murderers face-to-face on death row; patrolled with the LAPD and the RCMP. His true crime articles have appeared in The New York Times, Marie Claire, Reader’s Digest and Penthouse. He’s reported from the U.S., Canada, the Caribbean, Africa, Qatar and Kuwait’s border with Iraq.
Three months ago, Lena Nguyen’s estranged twin sister, Cambry, drove to a remote bridge sixty miles outside of Missoula, Montana, and jumped two hundred feet to her death. At least, that is the official police version. But Lena isn’t buying it. Now she’s come to that very bridge, driving her dead twin’s car and armed with a cassette recorder, determined to find out what really happened by interviewing the highway patrolman who allegedly discovered her sister’s body. Corporal Raymond Raycevic has agreed to meet Lena at the scene. He is sympathetic, forthright, and professional. But his story doesn’t seem to add up. For one thing, he stopped Cambry for speeding a full hour before she supposedly leapt to her death. Then there are the sixteen attempted 911 calls from her cell phone, made in what was unfortunately a dead zone. But perhaps most troubling of all, the state trooper is referred to by name in Cambry’s final enigmatic text to her sister: Please Forgive Me. I couldn’t live with it. Hopefully you can, Officer Raycevic. Lena will do anything to uncover the truth. But as her twin’s final hours come into focus, Lena’s search turns into a harrowing, tooth-and-nail fight for her own survival—one that will test everything she thought she knew about her sister and herself…
In the near future, after the internet grinds to a halt amid a wave of cyber-attacks, a company named Zodiac steps in to replace it with an evolved, augmented-reality version called The Grid. Harrigan, a hard-drinking private detective living as off-Grid as possible, is about to be evicted from his apartment when a stranger shows up asking for his help in finding Anna, an escort who he claims he’s desperately in love with. Turns out that through Harrigan’s new client, Anna has come into possession of a program/entity called Mirror, Mirror, which has the capacity to merge The Grid and reality, bending both to the whims of the program’s user. Soon Harrigan finds himself up against the last surviving organized crime gangs in Los Angeles, Zodiac’s mercenaries, and a mysterious group called The First Church Multiverse, all of whom are hot on the trail of Mirror, Mirror – if the comet rapidly approaching Earth doesn’t kill them all first.
The law in Abai—the last known magical kingdom—does not look kindly on street thieves, but for eighteen-year-old orphan Ria, stealing isn’t a choice of convenience: it’s a matter of survival. So when she and her friend Amir devise a plan to steal priceless jewels from the kingdom’s royal palace and use them to bribe their way into a new kingdom, it seems a new life may finally be within reach. Then, while sneaking into the palace, Ria runs into the princess, and everything she knows about herself is turned on its head—because Princess Rani looks exactly like Ria, down to the freckle. Running into her doppelgänger, Princess Rani doesn’t see her long-lost twin or a dangerous, thieving intruder. She sees an opportunity: a chance to escape the tight confines of her gilded prison before her marriage, and a chance to find the wife of her late, beloved tutor, recently executed for treason, so that Rani can give her the valuable possessions he left behind. After Ria and Rani strike a deal to temporarily switch places, Rani discovers that her father’s kingdom is not the place of prosperity she once thought, and that it’s hurtling toward a dangerous war. Living with the Raja and the queen, Ria learns that they—her family?—have their own dangerous secrets, and that there’s a treasonous conspiracy brewing in the royal court. Neither life inside nor outside the palace walls are safe, and Ria and Rani are in a race against the clock to unravel a conspiracy and stop a war with wits and magic—or else allow the kingdom of Abai to sink into ruin.
Eleven-year-old Maybelle Lane collects sounds. She records the Louisiana crickets chirping, Momma strumming her guitar, their broken trailer door squeaking. But the crown jewel of her collection is a sound she didn’t collect herself: an old recording of her daddy’s warm-sunshine laugh, saved on an old phone’s voicemail. It’s the only thing she has of his, and the only thing she knows about him. Until the day she hears that laugh—his laugh—pouring out of the car radio. Going against Momma’s wishes, Maybelle starts listening to her radio DJ daddy’s new show, drinking in every word like a plant leaning toward the sun. When he announces he’ll be the judge of a singing contest in Nashville, she signs up. What better way to meet than to stand before him and sing with all her heart? But the road to Nashville is bumpy. Her starch-stiff neighbor Mrs. Boggs offers to drive her in her RV. And a bully of a boy from the trailer park hitches a ride, too. These are not the people May would have chosen to help her, but it turns out they’re searching for things as well. And the journey will mold them into the best kind of family—the kind you choose for yourself.