Be patient with this one and you will be rewarded.  Alice and Merrily are connected, somehow, through Rick. Alice was kidnapped as a child and while she was returned home safely, she's never really gotten over the experience- she's obsessive about child abduction.  And then one day, she sees the face of the man who took her on a website. Merrily is engaging in unwise behavior on the internet.   The story is told by these two women and things take off when they find each other.  No spoilers here.  You might think Alice is immature (and she's definitely got some issues) and that Merrily is out there but they're well drawn characters.  Thanks to the publisher for the ARC.  Good story telling and a well thought out plot make this a good read.

An internet group that works cold cases to find missing persons sounds like a very good plot for a book...and it was.  The story centers around the group with particular emphasis on two teenage women who each have their own reasons to help.  Lori Rader-Day builds each of their stories in layers, adding to the overall suspense.  The teenagers met through the online group but eventually find they have common history.  The suspense and the conclusion are well written, you are given clues but you have to watch for them.  This was a very good read.

Thanks to Netgalley for providing a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review. This book was very interesting - a novel concept (to me at least) concerning people who, in their spare time, help ID missing persons via a website, the Doe Pages, devoted to the topic. But one of those people was almost a statistic herself - the "lucky one" who was rescued by her then-cop father. But the details are sketchy, and Alice doesn't remember more than snatches of the episode, until the day she sees her kidnapper's face as a missing person on the Doe Pages ...

Where this book really shines is in its characters: the main ones are real, diverse (there is a handicapped supporting character, which you just don't really see much unless it's a vehicle for the plot, a la "Rear Window"), and fairly fleshed out. Unfortunately, many of the other characters are ... not. In part, this drives the plot in such a way as to provide many avenues for the reader to drive down and hit a dead end in solving the mystery ahead of the end of the book, but it's notable. There are some things alluded to in the book that sort of never come up again, or are just not relevant to the plot - this to me is an editing issue.

Alice is a good character but she has a sluggishness that makes her difficult to relate to - her life is going nowhere and she seems to have been stumbling through adulthood after her mother's death. What isn't really discussed (until the big reveal at the end) is how her mother never showed her any warmth, affection, or even much interest. Why is Alice stuck in this quicksand as a character?

Merrily is rather more interesting, with her unconventional mom and her side hustle that involves video chat with lonely maybe-incels who pay to see her knees. She's in a dead-end job but at least she gets away from it when her mom's ex-boyfriend goes missing - and provides a link to the Doe Pages and Alice.

Juby and Lillian, Doe Pages volunteers of the finest stripe, are the best characters for me, and I'd be interested in a book of just their exploits, or just more of how the Doe Pages work, the moderators, etc. 

This was my first Lori Rader-Day book; I know she has been around for awhile. I was engaged in the story, but this one just didn't do it for me at the end.

I really hate to say it, but this book really wasn't for me. I understand "slow burn" plots - especially in the mystery/thriller genre to create a sense of darkness, of unease, of fear - but this one was such a slow burn that you couldn't even describe it as a simmer. I felt that I was slogging through the majority of the book, reading about two characters whom I did not identify or sympathize with - Merrily and Alice just were not interesting to me. Each chapter told in their perspective was too short and left me wanting to know more about them - it felt more like telling than showing, and every time I was interested in something that happened with one of them, the chapter would end and switch to the other woman. Finally, when the plot did start to pick up a bit, I was still not invested in the story enough to care what happened - it never ended up "catching fire" for me and the climax didn't make the slowness of the rising action worth it. I requested this because the premise sounded intriguing, but I don't think the execution worked here for me.  I really enjoyed Little Pretty Things by the same author so I was hoping I would like this just as much, but no luck. Thank you for the opportunity to review!

This book was a slow burn, but never really caught fire.  With a long ago kidnapping, a missing person website and two story lines that we hope are somehow going to connect, this one should have been a great read.  Unfortunately, the writing style was somewhat clunky and disjointed.  It wasn’t a bad read, but lacked the suspense needed to carry it clear through to the end.

At first I thought premise sounded very interesting but as I started to read it I find the pace to be very slow and with the 2 pov's just seemed sort of disjointed for me.  Sadly, I couldn't continue and it just wasn't for me.

I received this book at my request and have voluntarily left this unbiased review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

An intelligent thriller with a tight and unpredictable plot, The Lucky One delves into the world of missing persons or “does.” Alice works with an online network that tries to find them after the police gives up and the trail goes cold. Alice’s handle is “The Lucky One” because she herself was abducted as a toddler, even if only for a few hours before her cop father found her and got her back. The other main character, Merrily, is also a young woman. Where Alice is fearful and scared, Merrily is outgoing and lazy. They both want more from life but seem content enough in their lives. Alice lost her mom, but her dad is very present. Merrily has no dad, but she’s really close to her mom. When an old boyfriend of her mom’s who has been in touch with her all her life seems to disappear, she adds him to the doe pages and Alice sees him, recognizing the man who abducted her. They both start looking for him, opening a can of worms with unimaginable consequences that they won’t see coming. Alice and Merrily are both very flawed. Some decisions they make had me screaming at my Kindle. Still, they are realistic and compelling. Their relationships with other characters and their perceptions of them are colored greatly by their experiences, so they vary greatly. It is a little slow at times, but the final twists were truly unexpected, so I couldn’t stop reading. 
I chose to read this book and all opinions in this review are my own and completely unbiased. Thank you, NetGalley/ HarperCollins Publishers!

On paper The Lucky One is exactly what I like in a mystery/thriller: two female protagonists with intersecting pasts. Alice was kidnapped as a toddler and years later spends her days working in a construction office and her nights playing amateur detective on a missing persons website called the Doe Pages. Merrily just quit her job, but has a side gig as a "cam girl" making money off of sad, lonely men. Their lives cross paths as both hunt for a missing man named Richard. Alice suspects he's the man who kidnapped her many years ago, and for Merrily he once was her mother's boyfriend, and is someone she's never quite lost touch with until now.

The set up was great, but for me the book just never took off. I don't need to like characters to enjoy a book, but I do need to understand them and that just didn't happen in The Lucky One. I found it difficult to even care about either of the women and frankly, grew a little bored with both their stories. Sadly, this just wasn't the book for me.

I received a free digital copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
This book was very fast paced and thrilling! I enjoyed the premises of this book a lot. I liked the mystery of this book. I love the dual perspectives, but ultimately it felt too predictable for me.

I can definitely see a reader for this book! I read it on a plane and it's a pretty good read for that, a thriller, fast paced, with unreliable/unlikable narrators. If anything, I think the explanation at the end was a little too complicated and overworked to make sense.

Wow. This mystery is crazy & I had no idea where it was going! So clever & really cool how all the pieces of the puzzle finally fit together.

This was my first Lori Rader-Day book and I was quite impressed with most of it. The character development was good, and the flow of the storyline was excellent. 
We first meet Alice, a young woman working in a man’s world of construction in the family business. She has been haunted by the memory of being kidnapped as a small child and works with other friends, such as Lillian and Juby, in a volunteer group of “The Doe’s or the Doe Pages”. This is a group investigating lost or missing persons. They use whatever means they have to research and possibly track down information concerning these situations. 
Then enters Merrily and her mother. Took me a little bit to figure out what type of work Merrily does. The chapters switch back and forth between Merrily and Alice. There was really two developing mysteries, one at work and one missing person and they always left you with a thought that something wasn’t stacking up, but it is just out of reach to try and figure it out. The only downside I found to the story was the lead up to the ending. There was so much happening with so many different characters I had to re-read it to get it all straight. Other than that, it was a quick enjoyable read. Comes in with 4 stars. 
I was given an advance copy from Harper Collins Publishers through Net Galley for my honest review, this one gets 4 stars.

This had a lot going on and I had a hard time staying with everything but in the end it all came together.  If you like trying to connect the dots on your own, you will enjoy this one!!

In Lori Rader-Day's newest, she's taken the current fascination with true crime and citizen detectives and crafted an of-this-moment, creative story. There's a great element of tension and suspense in Alice's story in particular, as she pieces together her past and present to come to the thunderous conclusions. There are a lot of characters to keep straight in this one, but the overall push of the plot made up for it.

This was such an interesting mystery!

When she was three years old, Alice was abducted. Her police officer father found her in just a few hours, but the incident affected her for life, turning into an obsession over finding other missing girls and women. While scrolling through the Doe Pages (the amateur sleuth website), Alice stumbled upon a picture that would upend everything she knew about her own life.

I really liked this mystery and the entangled narratives of Alice and Merrily, another woman looking for her missing stepfather. The characters were well-drawn, and there were a lot of surprises!
2 likes

Awesome, thrilling book that kept me interested from page 1.  Would definitely recommend to other thriller lovers.  The pace was good and the characters were well written.

Lori Rader-Day was an author I had heard of but wasn’t big on my radar.  Then I realized she’s won a few awards and was born in a small town right next to mine, so I decided to check her out.  I am glad I did.

The book caught my attention from the very beginning.

As a toddler, Alice was abducted from her yard in the small Indiana town where she lived. Her father was a policeman and fortunately was able to recover her pretty quickly. Although Alice’s father found her, the incident motivated her father to leave the police force and move the family to Chicago. He started a construction business, and now adult Alice somewhat reluctantly works there. Although she remembers snapshots from that day, she doesn’t remember everything and continues to be haunted by the experience. Alice works with a group of other volunteers on the internet through a website called the Doe Pages to try to locate missing persons or identify unidentified bodies to give peace to the family members left behind. Her life changes when she is scanning the Doe Pages one day and sees a picture of the man who abducted her.
I would say this book is both a mystery and a thriller. There is the mystery surrounding the events of Alice’s kidnapping, and there is also the thriller element of foreboding, anticipating danger around the corner. This book does not have the fast-paced aspect of most thrillers, though. The pace gradually builds throughout the book and becomes much faster as everything starts coming together. A lot is going on in this book. The storyline is detailed and well-plotted with some interesting side characters like the two women from the Doe Pages who decide to help Alice look for her kidnapper. I found the idea of a group of people looking for missing people fascinating, and since I live in Indiana, I loved that Rader-Day set some parts there.  I would have rated this higher except that I found it was a little long.  I think that part of it could have been removed to move it along more.

This was a real page turner. Alice was a "lucky one"--- abducted as a child she was recovered and returned to safety very quickly. As an adult she joins the Doe network a website that seeks to locate the missing. One day she finds a photo of her kidnapper now one of the missing. Further researching she crosses paths with Merrily. The missing man was her "almost" stepfather from her early childhood. Joined by Lillian and JuJu from the Doe network, this diverse band of women embarks on a multi-state road trip in search of truth. The emotional journey reveals that their early memories were flimsy fabrication. They discover a twisted trail of corruption, bad cops and the flaws in witness protection. With each new revelation. Merrily and Alice find themselves rethinking who they are and what they value. What holds a family together...what tears it apart. I was on the edge of my chair..I wanted answers and I wanted to find out as quickly as possible. Fast read.

3 stars. 

Merrily and Alice come from different worlds, but the story is told from both perspectives. Alice is an adult who was kidnapped as a child. She has an interest in the Doe Pages, which helps solve cases. Merrily is working, but cannot get off of the Chat X website that seems very similar to a sugardaddy/sugarbaby site. She has a unique relationship with "Searcher" who sends her decent money and expects virtually nothing but companionship from her.  Merrily and Alice cross paths unexpectedly, and the story that unfolds is.... unlikely.

The plot was great and the description piqued my interest. However, this was a slow read for me, and did not keep my interest. I definitely skimmed here and there, and was just glad that it was finished. There were no questions at the end for me, but this is just "meh" to me. 

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

My Thoughts

This book had me from the moment Alice recognized her kidnapper.  First off, Alice is a rare statistic that a kidnapped child was found within hours of being taken.  Second, they never even had any leads on who took her.  That being said, it was a little suspicious to me that she was found so soon, and that there was hardly any media coverage.

This book has a lot of players, and I had problems keeping everyone straight.  To all the guys who worked at the construction site, to the man she almost married, to friends from The Doe Pages.  I will admit I liked the concept of The Doe Pages.

I got bored trying to keep up with everything.  Also, the more you read, the more you can figure out what's going on.

This was almost a DNF for me, but I really wanted to see if everything tied together in the end.

Thank you NegGalley and and William Morrow for the digital copy of this ARC.