I want to say upfront that I received an ARC of Lost to Dune Road from NetGalley so I’m hoping the mistakes are fixed before publication.

I was excited to see Kara Thomas back! I still think her YA is a little more solid than her adult fiction but this was a good start to what honestly felt like a series to me.

I did think some of the storyline was too easy—she seems to have written about everyone involved in both cases and then either forgot or didn’t think it was important (like having interviewed one suspect’s adult child and daughter-in-law somehow doesn’t come up until chapters after she learns about the suspect’s connection to the case—in fact, at first it seems like she forgot the suspect even had an older child) and everyone seems oddly eager to talk to her.

The major issue was the character of William. At one point he sends her photographs from an art gallery show that a lot of the plot hinged on. He was someone who had worked parties with the injured woman and had a defunct food/drink truck business but the then the book says he was from the NYPD in the paragraph that has her finding the email he spent her prior to their argument. His working at the NYPD is repeated again in her conversation with her contact Chase but in the rest of the book, William is not involved with the NYPD at all. At first I thought there were bizarrely two characters named William because the email sender had a different last name than food truck William but then it was clear when she talked to him and looked at the photos that food truck William was in the photos and was who sent them to her.

The storyline with Chase felt flimsy. It didn’t seem like they had ever really dated yet acted like young teens around each other. He was a very flat character and really didn’t add anything to the book. If she had remembered who she had interviewed from that community when she was a reporter, she could have made the connections he gave her herself.

These issues, among other things made the book feel like a rough draft that hadn’t made it to the editors yet. The ending seemed a little rushed and anticlimactic.

That said, I enjoyed the character of Lee and her background. I think we could see more of Lee solving crimes with her journalism and PI skills and over all it set up pretty solid mystery about two women and the literal abuse and abuse of power of rich men.