Met detectives Geneva Miller and Jack Carrigan are trying to view technology as a helpmeet, but the cyberstalking they're up against in The Intrusions, the gobsmackingly good third book in Stav Sherez's Carrigan and Miller series, makes this difficult. At one point, Miller is moved to wonder "whether for every benefit technology bestowed there was a corresponding evil."
It's Monday, and Miller is outside the station on a cigarette break when someone barrels into her. Her assailant, a young Australian woman named Madison, insists that a man with a van abducted her friend Anna and promised that "he was coming back to claim me." Regarding the "when" of it, Madison tells Miller that she and Anna went to a club on Friday night, imbibed a bit and then felt wonky--in Madison's case, sufficiently wonky to lose three days.
Miller is more inclined than Carrigan to believe Madison's story, but like him, she pauses at an apparent incongruity: Why were both women drugged but only one abducted? All skepticism about Madison's story fizzles when Anna's dead body is found in a housing squat, an incision in her neck.
The Intrusions offers an all-too-rare experience in a thriller: at book's end, readers will be giddily kicking themselves for not having seen the solution nipping at their heels. Along the way, Sherez builds on the dynamics between Carrigan and Miller that he cultivated in the series' previous titles, A Dark Redemption and Eleven Days. As far as slaying the detectives' personal demons goes, technology is, it's fair to say, useless. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer