Blink by Sasha Dawn (review)

Josh is at the beach, caring as usual for his little half-sisters, when he meets beautiful Chatham Claiborne. He falls for her instantly, and when he finds out she's traveled from Georgia to his small Illinois town to look for her missing sister, he's on board to help her. As the two become closer, however, he's afraid to suck Chatham into his dysfunctional family life, especially now that his violent ex-stepfather is back in the picture; he also realizes that Chatham is hiding some large secrets, and that she and her sister may have a connection to his town's legendary missing persons case. This is solid noir, with complicated double twists, questions about who's to be believed, and a persistent sinister threat. It's got more heart than much of the genre, though, in its characters. Chatham is an original take on the classy noir dame, and she remains a sympathetic and admirable character even as her story grows more shadowy. Josh, bitterly sacrificing his life in the face of his mother's incompetence and his stepfather's physical abuse, is no patsy but an honorable and haunted guy torn between his questioning impulses and his yearning for Chatham. While there's some foreshadowing of the outcome, the real pleasure is in unknotting the tangled skeins of the past, and readers won't have to follow every turn to enjoy the process.