My Little Pocketbooks: Review: If You Were Here

If You Were Here
Author: Alafair Burke
Genre: Suspense
Publisher: Harper
Release Date: June 4, 2013
Hardcover: 384 pages
Source: Free from Publisher at BEA13

Book Description

If You Were Here is a thrilling novel of suspense from Alafair Burke, the author Dennis Lehane calls “one of the finest young crime writers working today.”
Manhattan journalist McKenna Jordan is chasing the story of an unidentified woman who heroically pulled a teenaged boy from the subway tracks. When she locates a video that captures part of the incident, she thinks she has an edge on the competition scrambling to identify the mystery heroine, but is shocked to discover that the woman in the video bears a strong resemblance to Susan Hauptmann, a close friend who disappeared without a trace a decade earlier.
What would have been a short-lived metro story sends McKenna on a dangerous search for the missing woman—a search that will force her to unearth long-buried truths much closer to home…

Review

This book was mailed to me from the publishing company after I didn’t get a copy from BEA13. I waited in line for a while only to find out I just missed out. I left my information and honestly didn’t think they would send me a copy the following week like they said. I think it actually showed up three weeks after BEA13 and I had completely forgotten about it.

If you had a friend who just vanished of the Earth, would you consider her dead after five years or just think she is in hiding? A mysterious woman chances a boy who just stole her cell phone though the crowds of a New York subway platform. The video of the chase goes viral when someone sees her lift the fallen kid off the tracks before the on coming train runs him over. Yes! She saves his life, gets her phone back and no one knows who this super woman is. Once the whole world has seen it one person thinks she knows the name of the mysterious super woman but that would mean she was not dead after all.

There are some books that love to create a web of several story lines only to bring you back full circle. Then there are the others that make a small situation into the end of the world complicated. This book is a bit of both. You will go from one story about the kid and cell phone then you will find yourself reading about the FBI, dead cops and terrorist. The story reminds me of an episode of Law and Order. One minute it’s a dead person and the next you are on an undercover sting for the Russian underground sex slave business. This book tries to bring all the Law and Order elements into your journey. You have the report for a magazine who use to be a Lawyer. There is the detective helping her out along the way, the FBI and the bad guys. Everyone is here.

I think I was a bit overwhelmed with the number of webs this story created and how we get from point A to point B. There Is just to much going on and I would have liked it to be a bit simpler. I know life is not simple but…the boyfriend too! How many people need to be involved? The overall story is good and I would recommend this to anyone who is interested in Law and Order. There is a bit of violence here and there but nothing too gross and bloody.