The Lucky One by Lori Rader-Day ~ a Review

by Susan Roberts

"A dead woman looked out from the laptop resting on Alice Fine's kitchen table.  The woman's skin was waxen against the metal slab.  thin shoulders, thick hair.  She stared with sightless black eyes.

Alice studied the photo.  Juanita Doe, maybe.  They didn't know.  They might never know.  Race UNK.  Unknown.  Everything UNK at the moment.  That was the basic point with UIDs.  They were unidentified." (p 5)

Amazon affiliate links are used on this site. A free book was provided for an honest review.

February 2020; William Morrow; 978-0062938060
audio, ebook, print (400 pages); thriller

This dark and twisted book is told by the two main characters. Alice and Merrily are totally different people in every way but they both hold clues to what happened to them early in their lives and they won't have any answers until they can work together.

Alice lives with her father and works with him at his construction site.  Her mother died when Alice was younger but they never had a close relationship so Alice depends totally on her father.  She knows that she was kidnapped as a child and that her father, then a police officer, found her and brought her home within a few hours.  This knowledge has kept her from trusting other people except for a few family members.  When Alice isn't working, she spends her time working on the Doe Pages.  These are pictures and clues about bodies that have been found but not identified.  A group of people works together to try to make identification of the deceased person to bring closure to their family.  One day as she is looking through the pages, she sees the picture of the man who kidnapped her.  She knows that she has to find out more about him and starts hunting for clues with two other members of the Doe group.

Merrily lives a carefree life and does computer sex to make a living.  When the police question her on a missing man, she realizes that they are asking about her mother's boyfriend when she was very young.  She still heard from him occasionally and in her mind, he is a wonderful, though absent part of her early life.  She starts trying to follow clues to find out where he is and why the police are looking for him.
Both Alice and Merrily are on a quest to find out something important to them about their earlier lives.  It isn't until they start to work together that they begin to get answers but what they discover will totally change their lives and put them both in danger.

What could have been an exciting book was a little slow.  For much of the story, there were two separate stories with nothing connecting them and no connection between the two women.  It wasn't until they began to work together that the book got really interesting.  I was bored with the book when the two women were working alone as I didn't much like either character, especially Alice who seems to just live her life without any involvement - she just went along with whatever happened.  Merrily was a bit more energetic in her life but it didn't make sense to me why she was even looking for this man.  However, once they both started working together, after their initial dislike of each other, the book took off for me and I really enjoyed it.

’Twisting and compulsively readable, The Lucky One explores the lies we tell ourselves to feel safe.'

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Susan Roberts lives in North Carolina when she isn't traveling. She and her husband enjoy traveling, gardening and spending time with their family and friends. She reads almost anything (and the piles of books in her house prove that) but her favorite genres are Southern fiction, women's fiction, and thrillers. Susan is a top 1% Goodreads Reviewer. You can connect with Susan on Facebook, Goodreads, or Twitter.

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