Cristina Alger (The Banker's Wife, This Was Not the Plan) crafts a gripping story of suspense with Girls Like Us. Fans of murder mysteries packed with action and plot twists will be satisfied by this edge-of-the-seat adventure into seedy Suffolk County in New York.
FBI Agent Nell Flynn has returned home to the unbeautiful end of Long Island to sprinkle her father's ashes, close up his house and move on. Her father, homicide detective Marty Flynn, had some good buddies on the force, and it's nice to see them again, but Suffolk County doesn't hold many pleasant memories. Then Marty's last partner, Lee Davis, with whom Nell went to high school, asks for her help on one last case. Two young women have been murdered: "working girls," the cops call them; one of them was undocumented. In their details, though, these murders take Nell back to the murder of her mother when Nell was seven years old.
Is there a serial killer at work in Suffolk County? Is there a link to Nell's past? With violent action and split-second turns, this is not a book to put down easily: plan accordingly. Alger's thriller is emphatically plot-driven, but her characters hold their own.
Nell is a quintessential damaged cop, even if she is FBI: ignoring her own injuries, pushing too hard, taking foolhardy risks, with a strong sense of right and wrong (as her father seemed to have). Her personality serves as backbone to the electric plot of Girls Like Us, and the reader trusts that she will follow through to the truth, no matter how much it hurts. --Julia Kastner, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia