Gone Cold by Douglas Corleone, a Mysterious Review.

Review: Simon Fisk's six year old daughter, Hailey, was taken from her home twelve years ago and has never been found. A former US Marshal, Simon was not allowed to help the different agencies in the search for Hailey. He was told to stay close to home waiting for a ransom call or any information that may be conveyed by phone. A few months after her disappearance, Simon's wife, Tasha, died of an overdose. Hailey was never found. In the twelve years since he has spent his life as a private contractor specializing in searching not only in America but many foreign lands to finding and returning children who have been taken away from one parent by the other, or by a relative. When he was a child his own father took him from his mother and sister in their home in London and brought him to America. He has never seen them since. He has made a promise to himself that he would finally discover who took his daughter and why, or he would die trying, in Gone Cold, the third mystery in this series by Douglas Corleone.

Simon is now forty-one years old. He has no cause but his twelve year old cold as ice case to find the person who took and possibly murdered his six year old daughter. He knows it is an all but impossible mission but he can't let it go. And then there appears to be a break in the case. He receives an e-mail from Kati Sheffield, an old friend, a former FBI computer scientist who now, a mother of three, works from her home acting on the sly for people like Simon. With modern techniques she was able to make a portrait of what Hailey would look like at the age of eighteen. She did so and was able to match it to a young woman wanted for murder In Ireland. Kati tells him she would bet her life that Hailey Fisk is alive in Ireland. Simon immediately leaves his home in America and flies to Dublin. His search takes him through the slums and shantytowns of not only Ireland, but the United Kingdom and Scotland as well. He must find the girl before the police do and arrest her for murder. There he intends to find not only Hailey, but the people who were responsible for her disappearance and indirectly for his wife's suicide. He wants to make them pay for what they have done.

Gone Cold makes for an interesting, if not always suspenseful read. Simon's mission is a personal one, and as such his actions are likely to be dictated more from an emotional perspective than an intellectual one. That's not to say he does anything particularly rash, or even out of character, only that it's hard to separate the rational from the irrational in what he does. There are plenty of twists and turns in the plot and the action moves forward at a brisk pace. And yet, it seems as if there should be something else, something more, to Simon's journey. The payoff at the end isn't nearly as satisfactory at it probably should have been, and it's not clear why, or even what might have been added to make it more complete. This is a strong entry in the series overall, and one probably shouldn't quibble about how it plays out in the end.

Special thanks to guest reviewer Betty of The Betz Review for contributing her review of Gone Cold.

Good As Gone
Minotaur Books (Hardcover), August 2013
ISBN-13: 9781250017208; ISBN-10: 1250017203

Gone Cold

A Simon Fisk Thriller by Douglas Corleone