Problem Child

by

Victoria Helen Stone

She’s cold, calculating, and can deceive with a smile. Jane Doe is back in the Amazon Charts bestselling series – and this time, she’s met her match.

After a brutal childhood, Jane Doe has been permanently wired to look after herself and only herself. Now, looking next to normal, Jane has a lover and a job. But she hasn’t lost her edge. It sharpens when she hears from her estranged family.

Jane’s deeply troubled sixteen-year-old niece, Kayla, has vanished, and no one seems to care. Neither does Jane. Until she sees a picture of Kayla and recognizes herself in the young girl’s eyes, it’s the empty stare of a sociopath.

Jane knows what vengeful and desperate things Kayla is capable of. Only Jane can help her – by being drawn into Kayla’s dark world. And no one’s more aware than Jane just how dangerous that can be. Jane Doe was such an amazing thriller! I loved reading about Jane’s journey, and I was so happy it had a sequel in Problem Child.

Jane is working in the city. She has her loving cat, and she’s still in a relationship with Luke (who’s oblivious). At work, she’s planning to punish another lawyer who has been using her work without giving her the proper accolades. Then, she gets a phone call. Her niece is missing. At first, Jane couldn’t care less. She doesn’t want anything to do with her family. None of them is good for anything. This is until she is sent a picture of her teenage niece, and she realizes she has that empty stare Jane has herself.

Jane decides she needs to know for sure. Is her niece Kayla the same as she is, or is the picture just a picture? Jane goes back home. She meets with her brother, who’s in jail and her parents, who live still in the same place. Her mother has no lost love for Jane, but Jane couldn’t care less; she wants to find her niece. During her investigation, she realizes that Kayla has gotten involved with the wrong kind of people. People who are powerful and who would not bat an eye about killing a young woman.

For the most part, Problem Child gave me all the right emotions. I love being in Jane’s head, and I love how deceiving she can be. She’s a strong female character (which I adore), and just like Dexter, she can feel something for someone. I felt the storyline dragging in the middle of the book, and I was losing interest in the search for Kayla.

So good to be back with Jane Doe, everyone’s favourite sociopath! She’s settled down in Minneapolis, has a good job as a lawyer, a cat and a steady boyfriend who sort of gets her. She’s working out ways to get back at a lazy colleague who takes credit for her work but apart from that, she’s bored. When she gets word from her hometown in Oklahoma that her sixteen-year niece Kayla is missing, she really couldn’t care less until she hears that her niece is somewhat like her – cold, smart and calculating – and now Jane has a project to capture her interest.

While I enjoyed the first and last third of this book, the middle section felt a bit lacking in substance and sharpness. Maybe more could have been made of Jane’s plotting against her colleague back at work as that was dealt with superficially, and it’s always a pleasure to watch Jane at work destroying someone. As before, I enjoyed Jane’s snarky thoughts and approaches to problems as well as her awareness of her sociopathic nature. Kayla is a new force to be reckoned with, and from the ending, it sounds like we’ll be seeing more of her in the future.