Wendy the Super Librarian‘s review of Sleep Softly by Gwen Hunter
Romantic suspense released by Mira 01 February 2008
When my older sister was pregnant with my nephew she went through a phase where she couldn’t read about “anything bad happening to children.” This coming from a woman who used to read early Stephen King horror novels in my parents’ basement, in the middle of the night. Even factoring in her pregnancy hormones, I suspect this is what will keep a lot of readers away from Gwen Hunter’s latest, despite the fact that it’s not a terribly gory read. Sometimes the mere suggestion and an active imagination are too much to overcome.
Ashlee Davenport Chadwick is a single mom of a college age daughter, and a forensic nurse. She has just come off of a grueling shift at the hospital and wants nothing more than to fall into bed. However, her dogs have other ideas. They want to play catch with a ratty children’s sneaker they dug up somewhere. When Ashlee gets a better a look at the shoe she realizes that there is still a toe inside.
Ashlee follows procedure, preserves evidence, even finding the body and calls the police. Showing up with the local cops is the FBI, including Jim Ramsey who she is kind of dating. Someone is kidnapping young girls, and burying their bodies in old cemeteries. The girl Ashlee found was buried in an old plot on her family’s farm. It’s the sort of site that local history buffs would know about, but a dead girl on Chadwick land immediately places suspicion on Ashlee’s large, Southern family.
Sleep Softly is the kind of book that gets better as you go along. It starts out a little shaky because the author writes it in a manner that made me think I was already supposed to know these characters. After some digging, I discovered that Ashlee has been featured in the author’s Dr. Rhea Lynch series. It also took some time to keep the characters straight. Ashlee’s family tree is a sequoia, and like most good southern families there’s umpteen cousins to go around.
The suspense thread is pretty good here, although it does take some time to develop. The author spends the early chapters detailing the finding of the body, and then Ashlee’s involvement with the FBI investigation. This aspect took some suspension of disbelief on my part, because even though Ashlee is a forensic nurse, the dead body on her property means the Chadwick family is suspect.
The romance is fairly light, and doesn’t really come into play until the second half. Jim and Ashlee have a history, and I thought her reticence in taking their relationship to the next level was believable. Besides an age difference (she’s older), Ashlee learned some terrible secrets after her husband died of a heart attack. That betrayal still badly stings, and she’s not quite ready to thrust her trusting heart into another man’s hands.
Once I got past the early set-up chapters, I started to get a better handle on the characters and the suspense thread started to cook. I thought the ending was particularly well done, and while the kidnapping and murder of several young girls isn’t uplifting material, the author keeps the pages relatively gore-free. Fans on Hunters’ other books will surely be interested in this one, and even with my quibbles, I’m interested in reading some more of her work.
Grade: B-
Summary:
He’s searching for his perfect daughter … with each little girl he takes.Four little girls—each blond, each on the verge of adolescence—stolen from their families.
Their bodies discovered months later in shallow graves, surrounded by trinkets they never owned, clutching a scrap of paper bearing a cryptic verse.
As a forensic nurse in rural South Carolina, Ashlee Chadwick Davenport acts as both caregiver and cop, gathering evidence from anyone who arrives in the local E.R. as the result of a crime. It’s a tough job, both physically and emotionally draining, but deeply satisfying.
Then a child’s red shoe is discovered on Davenport property. The evidence leads Ashlee to the body of a missing girl and her work suddenly invades every aspect of her life. As an expert and a witness, she must call upon all her resources. And when the killer’s eye turns to her, she becomes intimately involved with a crime that tests her mind and her spirit … and the price of failure will be another child’s life.
Other books in this series:
