When All the Girls Have Gone

By: Jayne Ann Krentz
Published Year: 2016
Publisher: Berkley
Pages: 204

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I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. This in no way shape or form influenced my opinion.

Summary (Provided by Goodreads): When Charlotte Sawyer is unable to contact her step-sister, Jocelyn, to tell her that one her closest friends was found dead, she discovers that Jocelyn has vanished.

Beautiful, brilliant—and reckless—Jocelyn has gone off the grid before, but never like this. In a desperate effort to find her, Charlotte joins forces with Max Cutler, a struggling PI who recently moved to Seattle after his previous career as a criminal profiler went down in flames—literally. Burned out, divorced and almost broke, Max needs the job.

After surviving a near-fatal attack, Charlotte and Max turn to Jocelyn’s closest friends, women in a Seattle-based online investment club, for answers. But what they find is chilling…

When her uneasy alliance with Max turns into a full-blown affair, Charlotte has no choice but to trust him with her life. For the shadows of Jocelyn’s past are threatening to consume her—and anyone else who gets in their way...

                                                                          First Impressions

This cover looked interesting. It looked like it would be a creepy mystery which was what I was constantly in the mood to read in October/November. I would've picked it up off the shelves to read it if I had seen it in the library for sure.

                                                                            What I thought

I don’t know if it’s me or what, but I keep getting stuck with what I think is a mysterybut is more of a romance novel based around a mystery. When this is not what you’re expecting, it’s extremely disappointing.

Charlotte works in a retirement home near her step-sister, Jocelyn, who is currently attending a month long tech-free retreat. When Jocelyn’s friend turns up murdered, Charlotte heads to her friend’s apartment after she saw a mysterious letter at Jocelyn’s house from said friend. At the apartment, she runs into Max Cutler, the private investigator hired to look into the murder. From there, they essentially become partners and work together to figure out what is going on.

This book just bored me. It was super predictable and the chemistry between Charlotte and Max was terrible. In their first scene together, Charlotte walks into the lobby and Max’s immediate thoughts are “I can’t allow this woman to hire me because I’m attracted to her and I can’t sleep with a client.” Then immediately, Charlotte, who has issues with men, somehow forgets them and falls in love with Max. it was so unrealistic and frustrating.

I liked Charlotte at first when she was a single girl who was recently dumped by her fiancé and working in a retirement home. This is only Charlotte for the first few chapters of the book. As soon as she meets Max she forgets her past and forgets her job, essentially becoming his partner and solving the crowd. There is no mention of her job until she is back there at least halfway through the book.

There is also a whole subplot about Jocelyn and her friends and I feel like if this had been told from Jocelyn’s point of view, that plot would have been interesting and made this book a bit more intriguing. However, it just ads more confusion and more holes as Charlotte doesn’t understand what her step-sister is a part of or how it is connected to anything. And Max just magically knows what is going to happen because he is good at finding “patterns”, seemingly without evidence.

In the end, neither character was fleshed out well and it seemed like the killer was so random. Like his escalation and how he found who he was going to kill had so many holes and I could not connect. I knew what was going to happen and just kept reading it to get to those points. It was not a page turner in any sense of the word.
 

Don’t bother with this book. It is neither a good mystery nor a good romance. While it wasn’t horrible (meaning I was able to finish it and was interested at least a part of the time), I would not recommend this book. It was hard for me to write this review because I hate to write negative ones, but I can’t find much else to say.