Very good book. It was an intense, interesting read. I really liked the characters, they were strong and well written. 4 stars.

I found this to be an enjoyable read, keeping me on my toes throughout. The storyline was written well and flowed seamlessly. I look forward to reading more by this author!

I found The One That Got Away by Joe Clifford to be like taking a thrilling roller coaster ride. I am giving it four and a half stars.

The story of Alex and her ordeal at the hands of a serial rapist and killer. Alex is only rescued because the killer confesses. and goes to prison. Five years later, another teenager is missing, presumed dead and a mentally challenged man is accused of the crime. Alex takes it upon herself to prove the man did not commit the crime and while doing so, is almost killed again. This story is about young messed-up lives full of drugs and sex, and the one girl who was too free with her offerings. Highly recommended.

I enjoyed this suspenseful story. This is author is newer to me which I enjoyed to the end. This is a well written story about abduction of children. When the killer was caught and sent away, the abductions stopped until now. When another child comes up missing, how far is someone willing to go to hide the truth behind the abductions? I enjoyed the characters and what they brought to the story. They are connectable, engaging and bought the story to life. I found this story to be full of action and fast paced. I had a hard time putting it down. It is a great story that I enjoyed. I highly recommend this book.

*Thank you to Joe Clifford, Down & Out Books and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review*

Alex Salerno was kidnapped and left for dead when she was 17. She is rescued by a cop whom she later had an affair with. After the affair ended, she moved to NYC, and now 8 years later she is back in the small town she grew up in, called back by a student reporter eager to tell her story. She is planning to leave right away for NYC after the interview but what Noah Lee, the student, tells her, has her intrigued. Noah tells her Benny Brudzienski, in a mental institution, after being beaten nearly to death, may not be the murder of Kira Shanks.

Kira Shanks has been missing for seven years. She was a local girl who was a popular cheerleader but also promiscuous. Her body has never been found, but they found her blood and the blood of Benny in a rundown motel after she went missing.Reporter Sean Riley has been looking into this disappearance, and along with Alex, has doubts that Benny is guilty.

Alex is not a likable character but one you can't help rooting for. She has deep psychological scars. She drinks too much and does too many drugs. She makes a lot of people very angry and soon those very people are trying to run her out of town. Even her previous lover, Sean Riley, wants her gone. But as she gets close to the truth, she finds people to shelter her in unexpected places.

The road to the truth of what happened to Kira Shanks is a long one and I felt the book could have used a little bit of editing down. But the story was fantastic and has a very unexpected but satisfying ending.

Mysterious characters, wonderful plot. I love the ending, though not happy, but it gives us the satisfaction that something good may happen. This is my first book by this author - and definitely will not be my last!

12 girls are abducted, raped, and killed yet, only one survives. We are introduced to Alex, who was the one that escaped, but her life has not been all peaches and cream. She has struggled deeply with being the only girl to escape while others died when she gets asked to be interviewed; she jumps at the chance yet, it seems another girl has stolen the "limelight" from her. Kira is another girl who lived in the town and was killed by someone, yet Alex has questions. She uncovers that some people are willing to keep what they did a secret, and Alex doesn't just lay down and let it go. I felt for Alex on so many levels because her way of coping with things is not the best of ways, and she found herself in a lot of situations that could have hurt her more than she truly knows. With the help of one or two other people, Alex uncovers more than she planned to, and it makes you just hate people even more because of what they will do to keep the secret quiet. We do go back and forth between POVs with Alex and Ben. I felt for Ben on so many levels because he seems like a good guy, but he was treated differently just because his mind was different from the "normal" folks. Alex and Ben are two very different characters, and I think the author did a great job getting their lifestyles and how each one was treated a certain way down.

Joe Clifford's 2018 crime noir, "The One That Got Away," is a blast to read. Set in a small decrepit upper New York State town of Reine, a town that was left in the cold industrial wasteland of the eighties as the union jobs left and the high-tech hipster economy high-jumped over the region, it features a story of an outsider come to town to right the wrongs and bring justice. The setting is as much a character in the story as any actual character. As the lead character returns to the town on the first page, we are treated to the graffiti spray-painted on the overpass, "Abandon all hope ye who enter here."

That is truly how it feels to enter Reine, a throwback town where those who never managed to leave are slowly being choked by the weeds growing everywhere. Forget a Starbucks on every corner, here there's a dive bar every ten feet and motels so creepy you wouldn't let your worst enemy stay there. Reine was, in fact, on the list of the ten most depressing towns in America, we are told. "There was a barren quality, an ache and emptiness germane to the region." "Most likely it was the people, with their abysmal posture and sallow complexions, men and women who walked without purpose, resigned to their fate, knowing they'd never leave this place." In the bars, the old-timers still have "huge schnoozes, gin blossoms, livers on last legs, ballooned, swollen organs so jam-packed with waste and poison they hung over belts like colostomy bags, fierce testaments to self-destruction and the pursuit of darker causes."

What Clifford does so cleverly is that his outside investigator is not some wandering gunslinger or private eye, but a wounded sparrow herself, Alex Salerno. For Alex, Reine represents another life, one that in some ways she probably wants buried an forgotten. It was here that, at seventeen, she foolishly took a ride with strangers, that ride that your parents warned you about. Like other girls who had disappeared, Alex was made captive, tied up in a basement, left for days, miserable, scared for her life. But, unlike the other girls who disappeared, Alex lucked out and was found before it was too late. Her rescuer, Police Detective Riley became her hero and her lover, making her story into a town scandal. She left it all behind and over the next twelve years, drowned her psyche in drugs, alcohol, and self-pity.

But, as Alex knows her fifteen minutes of fame were soon up as another tragedy quickly befell the small town and the town's beauty queen high school sweetheart, Kira, vanished from a sweaty bloodstained motel room on the outskirts of town. Benny, the town's giant lumbering mentally disadvantaged guy was soon blamed, found, chased by an angry mob, and what was left of him, with half his brain splattered on the roadway, caged up in a mental hospital. "When word of Benny's involvement leaked," the narrator explained, "unidentified locals chased him down, ran his bicycle off the road, shook loose whatever remaining lug nuts were rolling around his junkyard oil pan." There, Benny is locked in his mind without the power of speech, barely more than catatonic.

Alex has returned to speak to a reporter about her past and the mysterious curse surrounding this small town. She is not really wanted there by anyone and no one wants her poking around the mysteries surrounding Kira's disappearance. In that foreboding sense, Alex is similar to another of Clifford's sorta-heroes, Jay Porter, the lead character in five novels, an outsider (who is really rooted in the small town) who no one wants poking around. Twelve years is a lifetime and there isn't much left here for Alex. But then again, there never was. As Alex explains, as bad as the three days and nights locked in the basement were, she could list at least fifty memories just as bad in a childhood living with a drunken town slut of a mother who did not give a crap about her. But, "No one notices a life lost in the cracks."

Alex is not exactly the kind of lead character most authors would write novels around. She has a checkered past. She still wants to drown herself in booze and drugs. She still consorts with the wrong kind of people. But that is exactly what makes this novel sing. There's a force to the writing here that propels the reader along starting from page one and never wavering to the end.

This was a pretty dark mystery. I really liked it, and yet I had major issues with it..

The main character was not really likeable. I get it - she was a mess because she had a rough life and she had been kidnapped etc. But I just had trouble relating to her. Then we have the cop that she had had an affair with. Let me get this straight - he is an adult,. a police officer who rescues a teen from a serial killer, and he has an affair with the teenage victim? And we are supposed to like him?

And yet... I kept reading. I was interested enough to know what happened next. The characters were not all the standard boilerplate cast, and this book gets bonus points for that. Also, the writing was really well done as I could feel the mood and I could picture this as a movie in my head.

So did I like this book? No, but I was interested enough to read it all. Will other people like this book? Yes, I think so. Just buyer beware - this had a really dark feel.

Thank you to the author, the publisher and #netgalley for the ARC which obviously did not impact my review.

A different kind of story about the only girl who was kidnapped and actually escaped from her captor. The premise was a good one but I would have enjoyed the story more of the language was a bit less. course. I had a hard time believing that the police officer would have an affair with the seventeen year old victim. This was just an okay read for me.
I received an Advanced Reader's Copy from Down & Out Books through NetGalley.The opinions expressed are entirely my own.
#TheOneThatGotAway #NetGalley

At 17 years old Alex Salerno was abducted by serial killer, Ken Parsons. She was the only one to get away. After she was rescued her fifteen minutes of fame was short lived and her life is jobs cobbled together to make ends meat.

When Noah Lee, hometown reporter with a journalistic pedigree, requests an interview, Alex returns to Reine reopening old wounds. What begins as a Q&A for a newspaper article soon turns into an opportunity for money, closure and—justice. Lee doesn’t want to talk about Alex’s abduction but that of missing girl Kira Shanks who disappeared after Alex was found.

The disappearance of Kira Shanks has long been hung on Benny Brudzienski, a hulking man-child who is currently a brain-addled guest at the Galloway State Mental Hospital. But after Alex reconnects with ex-classmates and frenemies, doubts are cast on that guilt. Alex is drawn into a dangerous game of show and tell in an insular town where everyone has a secret to hide. And as more details emerge about the night Kira Shanks went missing, Alex discovers there are some willing to kill to protect the horrific truth.

The book is told from both Alex and Bennys POV. I enjoyed this book. Sometimes it was a little depressing from Alex’s side of things. Overall a good read.

This book was sent to me on Kindle by Netgalley for review. It is a dark character driven novel with much intrigue. I could not get into the story as I do other mysteries but others might.

I enjoyed the book but I also found it abit boring at times.... and found myself wondering what I was actually readying about I didn't get lost in the story and felt it dragged on quite a bit.

The start of this book immediately got my attention as it dove right in to the heart of the story: we meet Alex our MC, or “The One That Got Away” from a notorious serial killer. Alex was just 17 years old when she was rescued, but our story takes place 12 years later when she comes back to her hometown Reine (in Upstate New York) under the guise of being interviewed about her experience. Accept, the reporter is focused on another murder, that of Kira Shanks, and that maybe they didn’t catch the true murderer.

Kira’s murder happened 5 years after Alex survived her own horror, but it’s one that has always overshadowed Alex’s story. Based on evidence at scene Benny Brudzienski, a young man diagnosed with Aphasia, who was unable to defend himself after getting beaten 2 weeks later and leaving him in a comatose state for the rest of his life. Despite the fact that Alex wants nothing to do with this at first, she can’t resist staying in Reine to find answers.

I enjoyed the overall plot and trying to figure out what actually happened, but Alex was a pretty unlivable main character. At times, I felt the story focused too much on her own mental state and problems, and instead of coming off dark and gritty, I felt it came off as just plain depressing more. There’s the undercurrent thought if she finds out what what happened to Kira, that some of Alex’s own personal demons would also be gone. I felt it did drag at times and I didn’t feel like I truly got into the book until about 2/3 of the way through.

I liked that we got Benny’s own point of view from when he first met Kira until the ending where we find out what actually happened. I found the ending well done, but not satisfying. We find out what happened, it’s not a huge twist, but instead a dark tale that matches the town of Reine. I found myself wanting a little more closure.

This had everything to be an amazing book but something fell flat for me and I can’t quite put my finger on what it was exactly - I liked the writing, but perhaps it was the characters that made me dislike this book more.

Alex isn’t a likeable character and of course you have sympathy for the situation she was in and this was understandable but she definitely could have been more fleshed out than she was.
I also found some of the twists predictable or obvious and I will commend Joe on the amazing foreshadowing that occurred throughout this book.
Equally, I thought the pace was slower than my liking which made me feel like I took years to finish this book when I usually finish it in 1-2 days.

Overall, a decent thriller with potential. The writing and structure of the book was great and the ending was decent enough!
I received this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Very entertaining stand alone. Have enjoyed Joe's books in the Porter series very much, so i couldnt wait to check out his new characters. Alex is a great character, little rough around the edges, but thats what makes her such an interesting character. really good book, Clifford keeps getting better and better, he is a must read for sure!!

Only one girl survives a string of abductions. The killer captured, no more girls would die. Until another one does.
This was good! Really good! Very well written, full of suspense, Flawed characters, Lots of drama!
I'm not going to lie..... I struggled at first! Pushed through and happy I did because it was a good ride!