The Trapped Girl

In Dugoni’s fourth entry in his Tracy Crosswhite series, the Seattle PD homicide detective and her violent crime team search for the killer of Andrea Strickland, whose body surfaced from Puget Sound in an illegal crab pot. The investigation focuses on Andrea’s unpleasant husband, Graham, the beneficiary of her insurance policy, but a shocking discovery forces Tracy and her team to discard all theories and start over again. Dugoni’s success in mixing riveting police procedure with Tracy’s personal thoughts is well supported by reader Sutton-Smith: her narration is crisply impersonal, faintly dusted with irony, when covering the elements of the investigation (autopsy and forensics, witness interviews, etc.), but warmer and more emotional when dealing with the team members. For chapters written as entries in the victim’s diary, Sutton-Smith uses a soft, self-reproachful voice to recount the events, from childhood to bad-choice marriage, that eventually prompted Andrea to take that eventful Mr. Rainier walk. A Thomas & Mercer paperback. (Jan.)