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Staff Pick
Nora researches missing people for a living, but when she’s pulled into a case involving the daughter she gave up for adoption years ago, she follows this investigation to a stunning conclusion. The Lost Ones is a dark, sinuous mystery that begins in rainy Vancouver, B.C., and winds its way into truly frightening places. Recommended By Moses M., Powells.com
Kamal's debut is a top-notch thriller featuring a fascinating main character, the wounded, tough as nails street survivor, Nora Watts. She out-Salanders Salander. The atmospheric Pacific Northwest setting is suitably dark, wet and creepy, and the villains are memorably villainous. This novel is fresh and compelling. Recommended By Kathi K., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Recommended for summer reading by TIME magazine
"A brave, unflinching heroine and brave, unflinching writing add up to an extraordinary debut – highly recommended." — Lee Child
A dark, compulsively readable psychological suspense debut, the first in a new series featuring the brilliant, fearless, chaotic, and deeply flawed Nora Watts — a character as heartbreakingly troubled, emotionally complex, and irresistibly compelling as Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander and Jo Nesbø’s Harry Hole.
It begins with a phone call that Nora Watts has dreaded for fifteen years — since the day she gave her newborn daughter up for adoption. Bonnie has vanished. The police consider her a chronic runaway and aren’t looking, leaving her desperate adoptive parents to reach out to her birth mother as a last hope.
A biracial product of the foster system, transient, homeless, scarred by a past filled with pain and violence, Nora knows intimately what happens to vulnerable girls on the streets. Caring despite herself, she sets out to find Bonnie with her only companion, her mutt Whisper, knowing she risks reopening wounds that have never really healed — and plunging into the darkness with little to protect her but her instincts and a freakish ability to detect truth from lies.
The search uncovers a puzzling conspiracy that leads Nora on a harrowing journey of deception and violence, from the gloomy rain-soaked streets of Vancouver, to the icy white mountains of the Canadian interior, to the beautiful and dangerous island where she will face her most terrifying demon. All to save a girl she wishes had never been born.
Review
"Fans of Scandinavian Noir will love every atmospheric moment of The Lost Ones. Sheena Kamal lends an electric jolt to Nora’s daily fight as a survivor of trauma and addiction. A woman both compromised and uncompromising, Nora is one of the most compelling characters to hit psychological suspense in years." Anthony Award-winning author Glen Erik Hamilton
Review
"Utterly compelling, rich with voice and psychological insight, populated with
heartbreakingly real characters, The Lost Ones will stay with you for a long, long time after you finish the last page. Perhaps forever." Jeffery Deaver
Review
"[A] searing debut...Though comparisons to Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander are inevitable, Nora blazes her own shining trail. A gritty, violent read with a tough, idiosyncratic, dryly witty heroine readers will root for even if they wouldn’t want to invite her home." Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
About the Author
Sheena Kamal holds an HBA in political science from the University of Toronto, and was awarded a TD Canada Trust scholarship for community leadership and activism around the issue of homelessness. Kamal has also worked as a crime and investigative journalism researcher for the film and television industry — academic knowledge and experience that inspired this debut novel. She lives in Vancouver, Canada.
Sheena Kamal on PowellsBooks.Blog
With the line, “I know a little something about the blues,” Nora Watts burst out of my imagination and onto the page.
Nora: a former blues singer whom trouble seems to follow around like the horny stray dog that she’d picked up along the way. What other music could capture a woman like that? What better character to write about for my first novel?...
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