Meanwhile, two police officers are murdered when responding to what could have been a domestic complaint. Loretta Picard was the apparent shooter and is being held for the crime. The next crime of note is the discovery of a murdered, unidentified female pulled from the river. Detective Laurence Soloman and his partner draw this case and appeal to the public for assistance in identifying the woman.

Emma realizes the victim is her babysitter Beatriz Castillo. She has her old friend the DA smooth the way at the police station for her to ID the victim. Again, not particularly wise since the DA is well hated and the police are just as determined to feel that way about Emma. In part because of this reaction to her, Emma commits herself to finding Bea’s killer, and in part because divorce looms because she has discovered Will is having an affair, and in part, because of what she feels she owes Bea. Gradually Emma and Detective Soloman move from protagonists to a team.

Linking these two sets of crimes becomes the easy part for the author. The hard part seems to be developing characters with enough layers and subtleties for a reader to care about them. In fact, the reader knows little more about the each character than is absolutely necessary to move the plot forward one erratic step at a time.

Terse with her words, Naomi Rand wastes little time in setting a scene, describing a scene or shifting from one scene to another. There are also scenes extraneous to the plot which seem placed there to make obvious social statements.

The fractured effect of combining all of these sparse elements is a story that The One That Got Away is hard to read and hard to care about. However, the fact that Emma is a clever investigator does give hope for future stories.

--Thea Davis