{"id":5444,"date":"2023-12-01T08:26:15","date_gmt":"2023-12-01T16:26:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=5444"},"modified":"2023-12-01T08:26:15","modified_gmt":"2023-12-01T16:26:15","slug":"paige-shelton-lost-hours","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/paige-shelton-lost-hours\/","title":{"rendered":"Paige Shelton: Lost Hours"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alaska Wild #5<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>I\u2019ve been following this series since book one, and I\u2019m glad I have, because I might have been a bit confused if I hadn\u2019t read all the adventures of Beth Rivers.\u00a0 A few years back, Beth had been abducted and kept in a van.\u00a0 She escaped \u2013 with grievous injuries \u2013 with her kidnapper still on the loose.\u00a0 She headed to tiny Benedict, Alaska, to hide out more or less on a whim, leaving her Missouri home behind.\u00a0 The \u201chotel\u201d she found was actually a halfway house, but it still suits her, as do the residents of Benedict, who don\u2019t make a fuss but form a solid community around her.<\/p>\n

Beth is also a well known thriller writer as Elizabeth Fairchild, and under cover of maintaining the local one sheet paper, she continues to write her novels.\u00a0 One installment saw her wild-ass mother, Mill, turning up; the last one sees her long absent father, Eddy, arrive in town.\u00a0 In this outing, Eddy and Beth are beginning to re-form their relationship. Eddy is running a tourist fishing boat business.\u00a0 Beth keeps her distance but it\u2019s starting to thaw.<\/p>\n

As the book opens, Beth and her boyfriend, Tex, are out on a big tourist boat to see the glaciers.\u00a0 Before they can see them, though, they\u2019re passing an island and they see a woman covered in blood waving at them from the beach.\u00a0 It turns out she\u2019d been kidnapped and her kidnapper was killed by a bear, so she was able to escape.\u00a0 Because both she and Beth had been kidnapped, they form a shaky bond, and the woman is taken back to Benedict to stay for awhile in the same halfway house where Beth lives.<\/p>\n

Beth also agrees to go out with her Dad as he takes a tourist family out for a day of fishing \u2013 the daughter is a big fan of Elizabeth Fairchild\u2019s books.\u00a0 Beth is a bit weirded out but agrees.\u00a0 Eddy has agreed to stop back on the island during the trip to check out where the woman was found, and while they are there, the daughter vanishes.<\/p>\n

So, there are two stories here.\u00a0 One involves the kidnapped woman, Sadie, who is being watched by law enforcement and is waiting for a federal Marshall to come and get her as she\u2019s in a witness protection program.\u00a0 There are all kinds of moving parts into the investigation surrounding Sadie, and Beth is not privy to all the facts, though as she and Sadie are living in the same place, she does glean some clues.<\/p>\n

The other story is the more breakneck hunt for the missing girl, Gracie.\u00a0 As connections begin to appear, Beth is a help in discovering the solution to this mystery.\u00a0 This book had some good parts \u2013 all the Alaska parts are wonderful.\u00a0 Good things: the way Shelton writes about nature; the way she\u2019s set up a community of characters surrounding Beth, and the smooth way she has with suspense.\u00a0 Ultimately, however, I felt the plot was a bit too complicated and convoluted, almost confusing at the end as all the threads of the story are tied together.<\/p>\n

However, this is still a fun series (one I think of as cozy adjacent) and I really like Beth and want to see what happens to her next.\u00a0 Shelton is a sly enough pro to leave the reader with a giant cliffhanger for the next book.\u00a0 I would really recommend starting at the beginning, though, as the first novel is spectacular and beautifully establishes the series. \u2013 Robin Agnew<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alaska Wild #5 I\u2019ve been following this series since book one, and I\u2019m glad I have, because I might have been a bit confused if I hadn\u2019t read all the adventures of Beth Rivers.\u00a0 A few years back, Beth had been abducted and kept in a van.\u00a0 She escaped \u2013 with grievous injuries \u2013 with … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1488,716,1490,1489,1487,100,472,1276],"class_list":["post-5444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-alaska-wild","tag-beth-rivers","tag-glaciers","tag-kidnapping","tag-lost-hours","tag-minotaur-books","tag-paige-shelton","tag-robin-agnew"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5444"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5444\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5456,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5444\/revisions\/5456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}