The Girl in the Ground

The Girl in the Ground is the 4th Nikki Hunt Mystery and I couldn't read it fast enough.  It is an edge of your seat crime thriller that captured my full attention in the first pages. Nikki is an FBI special agent working in her home town of Stillwater, Minnesota. The story opens with construction workers unearthing the skeleton of a girl in Stillwater. Nikki's boyfriend Rory Todd is working at the site and calls her when the bones are found. While Nikki knows instantly that the girl was murdered, she is shocked when Rory tells her that he knows who the girl is. The dead girl is his childhood girlfriend Becky, and he was the last person to see her alive before she went missing twenty four years earlier.  Rory, of course, becomes a suspect and Nikki is told to step away from the investigation. Soon it becomes clear that Becky was pregnant and that Rory was the father of her baby. However, Nikki still believes that he is innocent and investigates that case anyway. When Nikki finds a potential link to two pregnant girls who were found murdered years before, she believes that she may solved the mystery of all of the murdered girls.

The character Rory seemed somewhat different from his appearance in earlier novels in the series. He is incredibly untrusting of the police despite that fact that his girlfriend is one of them. While it is normal to fear law enforcement when you are a suspect in a murder, he even began lying to Nikki over mundane matters. I think if I was a suspect, I would take some comfort from knowing that my girlfriend could help me. Rory acts differently.  

 

The mystery concerning the pregnant girls being murdered was well thought out. The main missing woman is a surrogate for a wealthy couple who are unable to have kids. When she disappears they think that something sinister must have happened to her because she was not the type of person who would just disappear. Nikki is a close friend of the couple and decides to help them out and look for the girl. Her main investigation, though, is to figure out how Becky died and why. Nikki believes that the missing surrogate is connected to all of the other missing girls as all of them were pregnant. She has alot of cases to look into in order to solve the crimes.  

This latest installment of the series was a fun read. 4 out of 5 stars.