The One That Got Away

Only one girl survives a string of abductions. The killer captured, no more girls would die. Until another one does.
This was good! Really good! Very well written, full of suspense, Flawed characters, Lots of drama!
I'm not going to lie..... I struggled at first! Pushed through and happy I did because it was a good ride!

Very entertaining stand alone. Have enjoyed Joe's books in the Porter series very much, so i couldnt wait to check out his new characters. Alex is a great character, little rough around the edges, but thats what makes her such an interesting character. really good book, Clifford keeps getting better and better, he is a must read for sure!!

Joe Clifford's 2018 crime noir, "The One That Got Away," is a blast to read. Set in a small decrepit upper New York State town of Reine, a town that was left in the cold industrial wasteland of the eighties as the union jobs left and the high-tech hipster economy high-jumped over the region, it features a story of an outsider come to town to right the wrongs and bring justice. The setting is as much a character in the story as any actual character. As the lead character returns to the town on the first page, we are treated to the graffiti spray-painted on the overpass, "Abandon all hope ye who enter here."

That is truly how it feels to enter Reine, a throwback town where those who never managed to leave are slowly being choked by the weeds growing everywhere. Forget a Starbucks on every corner, here there's a dive bar every ten feet and motels so creepy you wouldn't let your worst enemy stay there. Reine was, in fact, on the list of the ten most depressing towns in America, we are told. "There was a barren quality, an ache and emptiness germane to the region." "Most likely it was the people, with their abysmal posture and sallow complexions, men and women who walked without purpose, resigned to their fate, knowing they'd never leave this place." In the bars, the old-timers still have "huge schnoozes, gin blossoms, livers on last legs, ballooned, swollen organs so jam-packed with waste and poison they hung over belts like colostomy bags, fierce testaments to self-destruction and the pursuit of darker causes."

What Clifford does so cleverly is that his outside investigator is not some wandering gunslinger or private eye, but a wounded sparrow herself, Alex Salerno. For Alex, Reine represents another life, one that in some ways she probably wants buried an forgotten. It was here that, at seventeen, she foolishly took a ride with strangers, that ride that your parents warned you about. Like other girls who had disappeared, Alex was made captive, tied up in a basement, left for days, miserable, scared for her life. But, unlike the other girls who disappeared, Alex lucked out and was found before it was too late. Her rescuer, Police Detective Riley became her hero and her lover, making her story into a town scandal. She left it all behind and over the next twelve years, drowned her psyche in drugs, alcohol, and self-pity.

But, as Alex knows her fifteen minutes of fame were soon up as another tragedy quickly befell the small town and the town's beauty queen high school sweetheart, Kira, vanished from a sweaty bloodstained motel room on the outskirts of town. Benny, the town's giant lumbering mentally disadvantaged guy was soon blamed, found, chased by an angry mob, and what was left of him, with half his brain splattered on the roadway, caged up in a mental hospital. "When word of Benny's involvement leaked," the narrator explained, "unidentified locals chased him down, ran his bicycle off the road, shook loose whatever remaining lug nuts were rolling around his junkyard oil pan." There, Benny is locked in his mind without the power of speech, barely more than catatonic.

Alex has returned to speak to a reporter about her past and the mysterious curse surrounding this small town. She is not really wanted there by anyone and no one wants her poking around the mysteries surrounding Kira's disappearance. In that foreboding sense, Alex is similar to another of Clifford's sorta-heroes, Jay Porter, the lead character in five novels, an outsider (who is really rooted in the small town) who no one wants poking around. Twelve years is a lifetime and there isn't much left here for Alex. But then again, there never was. As Alex explains, as bad as the three days and nights locked in the basement were, she could list at least fifty memories just as bad in a childhood living with a drunken town slut of a mother who did not give a crap about her. But, "No one notices a life lost in the cracks."

Alex is not exactly the kind of lead character most authors would write novels around. She has a checkered past. She still wants to drown herself in booze and drugs. She still consorts with the wrong kind of people. But that is exactly what makes this novel sing. There's a force to the writing here that propels the reader along starting from page one and never wavering to the end.

At 17 years old Alex Salerno was abducted by serial killer, Ken Parsons. She was the only one to get away. After she was rescued her fifteen minutes of fame was short lived and her life is jobs cobbled together to make ends meat.

When Noah Lee, hometown reporter with a journalistic pedigree, requests an interview, Alex returns to Reine reopening old wounds. What begins as a Q&A for a newspaper article soon turns into an opportunity for money, closure and—justice. Lee doesn’t want to talk about Alex’s abduction but that of missing girl Kira Shanks who disappeared after Alex was found.

The disappearance of Kira Shanks has long been hung on Benny Brudzienski, a hulking man-child who is currently a brain-addled guest at the Galloway State Mental Hospital. But after Alex reconnects with ex-classmates and frenemies, doubts are cast on that guilt. Alex is drawn into a dangerous game of show and tell in an insular town where everyone has a secret to hide. And as more details emerge about the night Kira Shanks went missing, Alex discovers there are some willing to kill to protect the horrific truth.

The book is told from both Alex and Bennys POV. I enjoyed this book. Sometimes it was a little depressing from Alex’s side of things. Overall a good read.