July 4, 1995, Preston, Annabelle, and baby Charlotte Margolis go missing from Cedar Creek, Nevada.

30 years later, in Raleigh, North Carolina, Sloan Hastings is on her way to becoming a Medical Examiner. She’s in forensic pathology training under Dr. Livia Cutty. If you’re a Charlie Donlea diehard like me, you may recognize Cutty’s name from The Girl Who Was Taken, which I will link down below. Sloan’s dissertation will be about advancing the field of forensic genealogy.

She calls on genealogist James Clayton for help with her research. He suggests she signs up for an ancestry site. He wants to take her through the process they used to find the Golden State killer using an ancestry site. Sloan is adopted and has never felt the need to find her birth parents but signs up strictly for research purposes.

James eventually finds that Sloan is in fact Charlotte Margolis, the baby who went missing 30 years ago. Now Sloan needs to see if her adoptive parents knew anything about it or if they are as clueless as she was about it. And also try to find out what happened to her birth parents and if they’re still alive.

The book alternates between the past and the present and is separated into 6 parts. Some parts were extremely (and I mean extremely) fair fetched. In the end when we find out what happened due to a baby clicking the camera button and the photos incriminate the people responsible. No way Jose. It was a tiny bit predictable, at least some parts. Otherwise the book was a quick read and another great one from Charlie Donlea.

4/5

See listing on Amazon:

Review for The Girl Who Was Taken:

The Girl Who Was Taken by Charlie Donlea 5/5

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Charlie Donlea

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