ARC Review: Girls Like Us by Cristina Alger

Girls Like Us
Author: Cristina Alger
Publication: G.P. Putnam's Sons (July 2, 2019)

Description: From the celebrated and bestselling author of The Banker's Wife, worlds collide when an FBI agent investigates a string of grisly murders on Long Island that raises the impossible question: What happens when the primary suspect is your father?

FBI Agent Nell Flynn hasn't been home in ten years. Nell and her father, Homicide Detective Martin Flynn, have never had much of a relationship. And Suffolk County will always be awash in memories of her mother, Marisol, who was brutally murdered when Nell was just seven.

When Martin Flynn dies in a motorcycle accident, Nell returns to the house she grew up in so that she can spread her father's ashes and close his estate. At the behest of her father's partner, Detective Lee Davis, Nell becomes involved in an investigation into the murders of two young women in Suffolk County. The further Nell digs, the more likely it seems to her that her father should be the prime suspect--and that his friends on the police force are covering his tracks. Plagued by doubts about her mother's murder--and her own role in exonerating her father in that case--Nell can't help but ask questions about who killed Ria Ruiz and Adriana Marques and why. But she may not like the answers she finds--not just about those she loves, but about herself.

My Thoughts: FBI Agent Nell Flynn is on leave after a shooting which injured her shoulder when she is called home to Suffolk County because of her father's death in a motorcycle accident. She and Homicide Detective Martin Flynn had a troubled relationship. They didn't speak for years and had only recently begun communicating by phone. She has very mixed feelings about her father.

While she is home, her father's partner Lee Davis encourages her to get involved investigating the murder of a young Hispanic girl whose body was found dismembered and buried in a sand dune. She learns that her father had been obsessed with an earlier investigation of another young Hispanic girl who had been murdered the same way a year earlier.

Nell and Lee's investigation leads them to a sex trafficking case with lots of very powerful and political men involved. It also leads to the investigation of the Police Department her father served and many of the men who were her father's friends and friends pf hers too. For a while, Nell even believes that her father might have been the killer. He was a suspect when Nell's mother was murdered in her home while Nell and her dad were on a camping trip.

This story was fast-paced and thrilling. The tension was high throughout the story. I really liked Nell.

Favorite Quote:

My father always felt like an enigma to me, even when we lived beneath the same roof. I wondered often if I knew him at all; whether he had the capacity or desire to really know me. Now it strikes me that we'll never get the chance. The thought fills me with a hard, uncomfortable sadness. I bite down on my lip. The pain keeps me from tears.

I received this one in exchange for an honest review from Edelweiss. You can buy your copy here.