When They Find Us
The Agent Victoria Heslin series, Book 3
Jenifer Ruff
Greyt Companion Press
Fiction, Action/Mystery/Thriller
** (Bad)
DESCRIPTION: Agent Victoria Heslin may be one of the FBI's best and brightest, involved in some prominent cases over her stellar career, but she also has interests outside work - such as the animal shelter for abandoned and abused hunting dogs she founded in Spain with part of her personal fortune. She's on her way there, with her veterinarian friend Ned (who might become more than a friend, judging from an unplanned earlier kiss)... but she never makes it to her London connection. Her plane disappears from radar in the middle of a storm. As her friends at the bureau scramble to uncover what went wrong, Victoria finds herself among a handful of survivors at a remote crash site far off the flight path, where no search plane would ever think to look - possibly stranded with one of the very people who made things go so very, very wrong to begin with. Though her friends back in D.C. scramble to uncover what happened, their best efforts may be too late to save her...
REVIEW: Every so often, I need a break from my speculative fiction reading diet. When They Find Us, from the description, looked like it would fit the bill, offering a little survival, a little action, a little thriller, and a series where it looked like I didn't need to come in on the first book. (And, yes, it was on sale. I still do not get the deal with offering mid-series books on sale and not the first title, but that's another matter altogether.) Coming off a fairly descriptive and verbose fantasy, the writing was an abrupt change of pace: very lean, rarely bothering to show what it could just tell me... and, it soon became apparent, stuffed to the rafters with stock characters, stock situations, and enough red herrings to populate a small sea. Or, at least, I saw them as red herrings, probably because I was looking for fish that just were not there.
Victoria's a prodigal agent, wealthier than your average god and with at least two men helplessly in love with her, who has, within moments of first meeting, profiled everyone riding in first class with her - profiles whose pencil-sketch impressions are never wrong, yet also are never particularly deep or insightful. Everyone is pretty much who you think they are: the obnoxious sexist jerk who doesn't waste a moment thinking of other people while guzzling all the alcohol and peeing in almost every available water bottle, the older woman who prays and cares for everyone but herself, the sorority girl who exists to whine and have a bendy-wendy ankle (seriously? We're still doing that these days?), the neglected teen son of wealthy parents whose missing medication for a "mental health thing" never becomes the potential subplot it could be, a cat for no earthly reason, and so forth. I had thought, or rather hoped, from the official description that Victoria would be dealing with the twin problems of survival in an icy wasteland and figuring out what went wrong, possibly sniffing out the terrorist in their midst... but, no. The investigation into what happens take place entirely stateside. Cut scenes reveal the mastermind of the plot to be, frankly, a naive idiot who adds pretty much nothing to the entire plot, whose agents are very obvious (and mostly dead.) There's also a sidetrack about missing diamonds that does nothing but eat a few random pages of word count. Survival is mostly sitting around in a fragment of plane, with the odd trek to search wreckage for supplies and not many complications until the survivors are forced to make a last-ditch bid to seek civilization on their own. And ultimately it's men saving women, even a woman who somehow managed earlier to stop a charging full-grown polar bear with a handgun. There is no mystery to be solved on the plane, there is no depth to anyone in the story, and there's ultimately no point to the bad guy's terribly botched plan.
On the plus side, the story moves okay, and it is more or less what it says on the wrapper. On the minus side, there are better stories of both survival and FBI investigations out there.
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