Until We Are Lost

Tara Peary, the protagonist of this smoothly written if at times confusing psychological thriller from Archer (The Girl at the Border), is a counselor at Seventh Haven, a New York City facility for troubled, marginalized teens. Though unlicensed and untrained, Tara does have a skill for establishing rapports with her charges, based on her own extensive sessions with her psychiatrist, Christie Lind. Tara has come to Lind because she has no memory of the last six months of her life, and she’s desperate to find her twin sister, Sophie, who’s everything she wanted to be, “beautiful, confident, and clever,” but seems to have dropped off the face of the earth. Meanwhile, Sophie has been living on the dangerous fringes of rich, entitled Hollywood society. The two eventually team up with government agents to try to foil a drug trafficker with a link to Tara’s shrink. The source of Tara’s psychological problems won’t surprise genre veterans, and the tacked-on crime plot serves mainly to tie up loose ends. The book’s readability and Archer’s gift for original metaphors suggest he’s capable of better. [em]Agent: Mitch Hoffman, Aaron M. Priest Literary. (Feb.) [/em]