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Forgive Me

Review

Forgive Me

Daniel Palmer has built an accomplished and varied body of work in a relatively short period of time. FORGIVE ME is his sixth book since 2011. Each is different from the others, yet all are threaded together by his considerable writing chops honed by the dogged persistence that preceded publication.

FORGIVE ME runs on a two-tiered plot track unified by the presence of Angie DeRose, a private investigator who specializes in locating runaway children and reuniting them with their families. My notes concerning Angie after her introduction include the words “Nancy Drew, all grown up and rockin’ it”; it’s one of my highest compliments, and I’ll stick with it. Angie was inspired to go into her line of work by the unsolved disappearance of one of her best and oldest friends. The woman’s picture, taken as a teenager before she went missing, sits on Angie’s wall, a reminder of a failure in a sea of successes. After some preliminaries, we learn that Angie has been retained to locate a troubled teenager named Nadine Jessup, who seemingly has vanished.

"I may be wrong, but FORGIVE ME has the feel of the start of a new series. It is complete in itself but leaves some matters dangling at the end, which would provide fodder to be pursued over the course of one or more future volumes."

The hunt for Nadine was my favorite part of the book, given its accurate portrayal of the sometimes unglamorous elements of private investigation work. “Unglamorous” does not mean “uninteresting,” however, and here is where Palmer’s storytelling skill set comes into play, as he describes how Angie and her somewhat quirky team, using a combination of skill and hard-nosed persistence, attempt to track Nadine and recover her. The former is easier to do than the latter, for Nadine is in dire straits indeed. Be warned; Palmer does not attempt to gild the lily on either child abduction or its all-too-frequent consequences. You will not read FORGIVE ME without considering the safety of your children and grandchildren even more often than you already do.

But I mentioned two tiers, did I not? The second involves the very sudden death of Angie’s beloved mother, who we meet all too briefly near the beginning of the novel. Angie is going through some boxes when she discovers a photograph of a young girl. The back of the photo contains a cryptic legend --- a code of sorts --- and the words “May God forgive me” in her mother’s handwriting. Angie becomes obsessed with the photograph and the potential secret about her mother of which it hints. The reader learns some fascinating nuggets about Kodak film and computer programs, among other things. None of that compares, though, to what Angie learns about her mother, and herself, when she reaches the end of her investigation into that picture, a result that briefly but unexpectedly dovetails into the aftermath of Nadine’s disappearance.

I may be wrong, but FORGIVE ME has the feel of the start of a new series. It is complete in itself but leaves some matters dangling at the end, which would provide fodder to be pursued over the course of one or more future volumes. Angie DeRose is an interesting and realistic heroine who seems just too good to leave behind. We’ll be waiting.

Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub on June 3, 2016

Forgive Me
by D.J. Palmer

  • Publication Date: May 30, 2017
  • Genres: Fiction, Suspense, Thriller
  • Mass Market Paperback: 304 pages
  • Publisher: Pinnacle
  • ISBN-10: 0786033851
  • ISBN-13: 9780786033850