THE SILENT GIRLS by Eric Rickstad

Finished very early, Tu 6/12/18 after a severe thunderstorm rolled through the area about 2am.

This is the first book that I read from the fourteen that I picked up at the library book sale last Saturday.

Set in rural Vermont near the Canadian border.

Frank Rath is an ex-cop that is now a private detective, but he helps his friends on the force.

Detective Groat is one of Rath's  policecolleagues and needs Rath's help to locate Mandy, a distant relation to Groat, beautiful, sixteen, and missing.

Rath uncovers, with the help of a couple of other working police, that a half dozen other teenage girls have disappeared over the last few years.

PREMISE:
An Abortion Clinic is infiltrated by a radical group trying to find young pregnant girls, kidnap them, allowing them to give birth in captivity, and taken the kid. Then, the girls are killed.

The main evil doctor is a man who's natural mother was abducted, and his 'second' mother was a nurse who horribly disfigured him at his birth. The novel opens when this doctor, as a child (this part is Halloween Night, 1985), brutally knifes a woman on her front porch during trick or treat. This woman lived, and was his birth mother. 'Nurse mother' had poisoned his mind about her.

ANOTHER SUB-PLOT:
Frank Rath's sister and her husband are brutally murdered during a home invasion by, Preacher, a man that they had hired many months before as a handyman. Rath raises the couple's daughter, Rachel, who was only a few months old and left to live by the killer.

THE BIG REVEAL:

Rachel is actually the daughter of Preacher. Rath's sister was a 'wild child' and had an affair with Preacher. When Preacher showed up, almost two years later for more sex, he was rebuffed and Preacher flipped. And, the reason he leaves the child is that he's her father.

The last seen of the novel Preacher has been released from prison for good behavior. Rath gets a phone call from Preacher and in the background hears canaries. Rachel and her roommate, Felix have canaries, so Rath knows that Preacher has gotten to Rachel. This apparently lays the foundation for the next novel in the series. 

Mandy was emancipated because her parents were substandard. She is murdered by Mandy's teenage girlfriend, Abby. Mandy is hit on the head with a tire iron and stuffed in the trunk of Abby's car. 

 From the author's page on the Internet-

"Eric Rickstad is the New York Times, USA Today, and international bestselling author of the Canaan Crime Series novels, which includes THE NAMES OF DEAD GIRLS, THE SILENT GIRLS, and LIE IN WAIT. These dark, psychological page-turners, set in remote northern Vermont, are heralded as masterful, disturbing, profound and heartbreaking. Rickstad’s first novel, REAP, was a New York Times Noteworthy Novel. His latest novel WHAT REMAINS OF HER will be published July 24, 2018.

Rickstad lives in Vermont with his wife, son, and daughter, and writes all his first drafts with a pencil in notebooks, often outside in the Vermont woods."

I took a chance at the book sale on this book (a buck for a trade paperback), and I'm very glad that I did. It's well written and a real page turner.