He's Gone
- tarascates
- Apr 11, 2017
- 2 min read
How do you find a missing child when his mother doesn't believe you have the right to even exist? When Detective Inspector Roger Bailley returns to work as Robyn, all she wants is to get on with the job she loves while finally being herself. When toddler Ben Chivers is snatched from a shopping centre on her first day back at work, Robyn has to find Ben and herself as she deals with the reactions of her police colleagues, the media and her own daughter.
Alex Clare wrote a great novel that actually makes police procedurals interesting and brings something new to the genre by featuring a transgendered detective. What really made this good is that Clare didn’t just jump on the bandwagon by incorporating gender dysphoria into her work to get views, she wrote a storyline that is actually worth reading. It was nice to see the topic treated with respect and not cheapened into an attention grabbing plot device.
Clare has you jumping into the action from the beginning so you immediately get hooked and won’t want to put the book down. Then she threw in a plot twist you won’t see coming and adds to the unpredictability of the story.
I liked her character work as she created some amiable people you can root for along with the endearing Robyn who was still trying to navigate her journey from life as Roger. Along with trying to learn to outwardly be the woman she’s always felt she was inside, she has to deal with colleagues who always knew her as a man and she gets thrown into the case of a missing child. Of course there was the requisite bitchy character I would ‘accidentally’ knock into moving traffic due to her treatment of Robyn.
I’m hoping this is the first in a decently long series so we get to learn more about Robyn and watch her evolve.
Thank you to Netgalley and Impress Books for allowing me to review this book.
*synopsis and pic from netgalley.com