No Place to Run

For two years, Aidan Faith, the 30-ish protagonist of this uneven psychological thriller from Edwards (The Devil’s Work), has fruitlessly searched for his British sister, Scarlett, who went missing at 15 while visiting him in Seattle. Then Aidan gets an email from Francesca Gilbert, who claims to have seen a girl resembling Scarlett from a train traveling from Los Angeles to Seattle. According to Francesca, Scarlett was running away from a man “with a bald patch on top of his head.” Aidan goes to Eaglewood, Calif., the nearest town to the place where his sister was apparently sighted. There, Aidan teams with Lana Carrera, who’s also searching for a missing sibling. Lana’s family was told her brother had burned to death in a sweeping wildfire, but she has good reason to doubt this explanation—and thinks he may even be alive. The tension rises as Aidan and Lara contend with people intent on keeping them from finding their siblings. Aidan and Lara are sufficiently developed to make readers care about them, but the initially well-paced plot bogs down toward the end. This isn’t one of Edwards’s better efforts. (June)