Tainted Love

Alex Mercer Thrillers Series, Book 6

By: Stacy Claflin

Narrated by: Rachel Dulude

Jess McAdams dotes on her four children and gives advice and suggestions to parents all around the world. No one would ever question her love and devotion to her children, let alone suspect her of murdering one. But Alex Mercer does.

Alex has plenty of experience investigating crimes involving missing kids. So when he senses something is wrong, he trusts his instincts. The only problem is, he's a newly deputized officer of the law. If he's wrong about Jess, he'll destroy his career before it gets off the ground.

He receives a tip that Jess has suddenly stopped posting about one of her children. It's almost as if he never existed, except her old blog posts show otherwise. The deeper Alex digs, the more twisted and sinister things look. His precinct's resources would be invaluable to his investigation, but his commanding officer isn't convinced the case is local and turns him down. And Alex doesn't have the evidence to sway his captain - yet. His only chance at finding the proof he needs is by using the resources he's been denied.

But Alex will stop at nothing until he finds the mommy blogger and saves the children he knows are in danger - even at the risk of losing his dream job - because he knows he's right. And with young lives on the line, there's a lot more at stake than his career.

©2019 Stacy Claflin (P)2020 Tantor

More character development (Contains spoilers)

While the overall book was entertaining, I was extremely disappointed with the lack of character development regarding Jessica. For a woman to be crazy enough to pretend to be pregnant multiple times in order to kidnap and raise 4 kids on her own, we as the readers need more information as to what could lead to such insanity. It was too much of a happy ending. “The bad guy/woman was caught and they all lived happily ever after. The End.” Very disappointing ending and kind of ruined the whole book for me.

There could have been more character development and background with Mason as well. What exactly made him so obsessed with Ava? How did a teenager cross the country seemingly so easily on his own? About what did he speak to Dave?

The narrator is terrible with men's voices.

The narrator's male voices are terrible. All the male voices sound like whiney adolescent boys and so closely the same it's hard to differentiate one from another. I've loved the series. That's why I've continued to listen hoping she'd get better or they'd get a new narrator. Guess there's no chance of that or it would have happened by now. Will just have to continue suffering.