The Forgotten Girls (Book #1 in The Suburban Murder Series) | Alexa Steele

 In an elite suburb of New York City, girls are dying. That doesn’t happen in Greenvale, with its immaculate lawns, exclusive yacht clubs and multi-million dollar mansions. But behind its perfect façade, its trimmed hedges and luxury cars, a darkness lies. Girls, dependent on Adderall, outmaneuver each other to get into top colleges, while the mothers’ need to live vicariously only makes it worse.

Bella DeFranco is one of the Bronx’s top SVU detectives. At only 37, she disarms everyone with her stunning good looks, yet she is as tough as most men—and a lot smarter, too. Yet when is summoned to Greenvale, she finds herself getting lost in a case that even she can’t comprehend. She stumbles into a land of secrets, a place where husbands hide their pasts from their wives, where friends are not what they seem, and where no one wants to know too much. As she digs deeper into layers of suburban dysfunction, she comes to learn that, behind all the fake smiles, there is a subtle violence--rivaling even her crime-ridden streets of the Bronx.
With a killer on the loose, time running out, and a new partner who never recovered from his washed-up alcoholic days, the odds are stacked against Bella. She is determined, though, to save these girls, whatever the cost. Yet as she gets close, the depth of psychosis she discovers shocks even her….
THE LOST GIRLS (BOOK #2 IN THE SUBURBAN MURDER SERIES) is now available!

The forgotten girls? A forgotten book. 30% into this book and I was still not invested in the story. The characters are flat, though in some strange sense still kind of relatable, but not enough so that you get invested in them. It’s a very difficult to describe sort of feeling, but when I hit the 40% mark, I decided to give up on this book and mark it as “did not finish.” That makes me very sad because…who the hell actually likes giving up on books?

The pacing is ridiculously slow. It felt like the same five fucking minutes were happening over and over even though the story was technically progressing, but fucking barely. Good lord. Maybe there just wasn’t enough action for this to be a book about a serial killer, which sounds just a little bit crazy, but, you can see how salty I am about it. Murder mysteries are some of my favorites, but this… just drained all of the mystery out of murder because I just was not there with the characters.

“You can start the day a stone cold loser–and end it a hero.” I’ll bet. This book is no hero of mine. (Yes, I had to. I’m a raging bitch. Let me live.) I’m sure I died several times trying to drag myself through it to find out what happened to these supposedly forgotten murder victims. *cries in reader’s woe*

“Or you can start the day high on the hog–but by bedtime be dead.” She makes it so easy, doesn’t it? *cackles* It really does kill me when a book is just…not good…at all. Just a special kind of torture. What did I do to deserve such suffering?

The story (or what I read of it, anyway) is burdened with too much telling. Can the readers get some description of what’s going on so we can see it? Or nah? It’s like… having the narrator inject herself into the events instead of watching them unfold with your own eyes. So that’s…not good. At all.

Long periods of time pass where there are no mentions of one of our main characters, so much so that…I kind of forgot about him… like those poor, forgotten girls.

This was my first time reading anything by this author. I generally do like to give unknown writers a chance, literally, one chance to to catch me. I wasn’t caught so I’ll give the rest of Alexa Steele’s novels a hard pass.