"Watch your back, small towns can hide killers"
Reviewed by Sharon Salituro
Posted November 22, 2017
Suspense | Mystery
Roxane is a PI, a job she enjoys, but of course, it has some
bad sides to it. Roxanne is still trying to get over the
death of her father who was a cop. So many people tell her
that she is just like her father, but she doesn't want
people to think of her that way. Roxanne is still having a
hard time dealing with his death. Tom, her father's partner
is trying his best to help her. Not only are they great
friends, but there are benefits that go along with it. Roxanne gets a phone call from Danielle. Danielle's brother
has been in jail on death row for about 15 years. Brad has
been found guilty of killing his girlfriend Sarah. Danielle
hires Roxanne to find Sarah as she doesn't feel that she is
dead, she believes she has seen Sarah. On the same night of
Sarah's disappearance, her parents were found dead. Roxanne takes on the case and comes across some information
in her father's study that shows another case of a young
blonde that he had been working on. The young woman Mallory
walked away from her husband and young child. Roxanne goes
to speak to the husband and her young daughter Shelby. Just
when Roxanne thinks that she is on to something, another
young girl disappears and it just happens to be Shelby's
best friend. Could this have something to do with the
disappearance of Mallory? Roxanne finds that her leads are taking her to a town called
Belmont. For some reason, the police are not at all happy
with her being in their town. Every time Roxanne steps front
in Belmont, the cops show up. Roxanne was arrested once and
sat in jail for over 12 hours. So what is the deal with the
cops in Belmont? Kirsten Lepionka writes a great mystery. Lepionka also
writes not only the mystery but the hardship that Roxane is
going through with the loss of her father. Even though this
is a murder mystery, there is a little humor in this story.
Roxanne while trying to get all the information she can, she
still has a little time for romance. Lepionka also shows how if you are bound and determined you
can solve anything. I noticed that this is a debut novel.
If THE LAST PLACE YOU LOOK is any indication of her writing
ability, I can't wait to read the next one. I am hoping
that there will be more stories that have Roxanne in them. I
would like to see if Roxanne and Tom make a go of their
friendship with benefits. So once again if you like murder mysteries THE LAST PLACE
YOU LOOK is a great book to pick up.
SUMMARY
Nobody knows what happened to Sarah Cook. The beautiful
blonde teenager disappeared fifteen years ago, the same
night her parents were brutally murdered in their suburban
Ohio home. Her boyfriend Brad Stockton—black and from the
wrong side of the tracks—was convicted of the murders and
is
now on death row. Though he’s maintained his innocence all
along, the clock is running out. His execution is only
weeks
away when his devoted sister insists she spied Sarah at an
area gas station. Willing to try anything, she hires PI
Roxane Weary to look at the case and see if she can locate
Sarah. Brad might be in a bad way, but private investigator
Roxane
Weary isn’t doing so hot herself. Still reeling from the
recent death of her cop father in the line of duty, her
main
way of dealing with her grief has been working as little
and
drinking as much as possible. But Roxane finds herself
drawn
in to the story of Sarah's vanishing act, especially when
she links the disappearance to one of her father’s
unsolved
murder cases involving another teen girl. The stakes get higher as Roxane discovers that the two
girls
may not be the only beautiful blonde teenagers who’ve
turned
up missing or dead. As her investigation gets darker and
darker, Roxane will have to risk everything to find the
truth. Lives depend on her cracking this case—hers
included.
Excerpt“Matt said you find things. For a living,” the woman said
on the phone. I was lying on the carpet underneath my
desk. I’d only answered the call to make the shrill
ringing stop. The inside of my mouth tasted like whipped
cream and whiskey, and the sound of my breathing was like
a roaring thunderstorm in my head, but at least I was
alone and in my own apartment. “That’s right,” I said.“What kind of things?” Her tone was suspicious, like her
main objective was to debunk whatever my oldest brother
told her. “Objects. People. Answers. Whatever needs to be found.”
“You good at it?” I hadn’t worked much in the last nine months and didn’t
want to start now. But my bank balance had other ideas. “I
am. Matt doesn’t like me much, so it’s a vote of
confidence he gave you my number in the first place.” That was the best sales pitch I could manage. Illusions
didn’t serve anybody in the detective business—not the
client, and not me. The woman chuckled. “He said you’d say that. Can you
help?” I thought it over. People give the worst advice about lost
things. Retrace your steps. Pray to Saint Anthony. Think
about where you last saw it. But that doesn’t apply to the
things that matter. Those are right in front of you,
except they can’t be found by looking for them. Only by
looking at everything else. “What do you need to find?” I
said, finally. “The girl who can get my brother off death row.” Ninety minutes later, we were sitting in the front room of
my apartment, which served as an office of sorts. Three
cups of green tea with mint had fortified me enough to
turn on a single lamp. I still chose to sit in the
armchair farthest away from it. Midday Monday light
streamed in from the west-facing window near the ceiling
but I kept the miniblinds firmly closed on the others. If
my new client no- ticed the cave-like atmosphere of the
place, she didn’t let on. “Until that night,” Danielle Stockton was saying, “I
hadn’t seen her in fifteen years. Nobody had.” She was about thirty or so, pretty and put-together in a
royal-blue cardigan and jeans. Her hair was pulled back
into a tight ballerina bun and she had a leopard-print
scarf looped artfully around her slim neck. She wore no
makeup except for a dark red lipstick. She worked at
American Electric Power, she had told me, and was here on
her lunch break. “Sarah Cook,” Danielle added. “That’s her
name. White girl. She and my brother were going out—that’s
what they claimed this was over, her nice white family not
liking him.” They were the prosecutors in her older brother’s case,
which Danielle had just finished briefing me on.
Bradford Stockton was almost twenty when he had been
convicted of murdering his girlfriend’s mother and father
fifteen years ago. Of stabbing them to death in their
living room with a Kershaw folding knife that the police
found in the trunk of his Toyota hatchback, wrapped in one
of Sarah’s shirts. The seventeen-year-old Sarah,
meanwhile, disappeared that night. The prosecution alleged
that Brad had killed her, too, and had con- cealed her
body somewhere. The defense hadn’t put up much of a fight, ignoring the
built-in alternate theory of the crime, that the absent
Sarah had committed the murders and then run. Brad had
just finished his shift at a Subway at the time Elaine and
Garrett Cook were killed, and he claimed he was waiting
for Sarah in his car in the parking lot. She’d been in the
restaurant earlier that evening—confirmed by Brad’s
coworkers— and the pair had plans to see a movie when he
got off work. But Sarah never came back, and by the time
Brad went to the Cook house to see if she was at home, the
police were already there and his life was already over.
He was convicted on two counts of aggravated murder and
had been on death row ever since. “She still looks the same,” Danielle said. She’d brought me a binder of newspaper clippings and
photos, a grim scrapbook of her older brother’s troubles.
A yearbook picture of Sarah smiled up at me from the
coffee table. She looked like a Girl Scout, honey-blond
hair cut into blunt bangs, a faint spray of freckles
across her nose. “I mean, she didn’t look seventeen anymore,” Danielle
continued between sips of tea. “And she’s put on weight.
But it was absolutely her. Not a doubt in my mind. Kenny
saw her too—Kenny Brayfield, he’s one of Brad’s friends
from school.” I raised my eyebrows. I’d heard crazier stories, but not
recently. “And when was this?” “Ten days ago. November second. Maybe seven thirty. Kenny
and I were meeting for dinner at Taverna Athena and we
both just got there when I happened to look across the
street and saw her at the gas station, walking out of the
little store. I ran over there but the traf- fic was
blocking my view. By the time I made it across the street,
she was gone. She must have driven away.” “Any idea what she might have been driving?” Danielle’s mouth twitched. “It’s a pretty busy
intersection. There were a lot of cars around.” I drew a bullet point in my notebook but didn’t write
anything else. Other than the blue dot, the page so far
was blank. “Can you remember any of them?” “Well,” Danielle said, “I saw a red four-door leaving when
I got over there. And like a green pickup, one of those
big new ones. And someone on a motorcycle, too. But it was
already dark, and I was looking for her, not at the cars.
So I can’t say for sure about that.” “What was she wearing?” “A coat, a long wool one. I think.” It was a lot of uncertainty, in an encounter not strong on
the details to begin with. I wrote down red sedan, big
green pickup, long wool coat. “But you’re sure it was
her.” “I’m positive,” Danielle said. I said nothing, just paged silently through the binder. It
seemed unlikely that Sarah would have been so easily
recognizable—fifteen years was a big time jump, and
Danielle had only seen her for a split second. In the
dark, at that. Besides, where had she been all along? I studied Danielle in the chair across from me. Although
we’d just met, she struck me as levelheaded and smart.
Maybe it wasn’t impos- sible. “So suppose I can find her,” I said. Danielle nodded. “What do you think will happen? How can she help? What
makes you think she’d want to?” My new client was quiet for a minute. Then she said, “Do
you be- lieve in God, Roxane?” I smiled. “No comment.” Danielle smiled too. “Well,” she said. “Brad is innocent,
okay? I believe him one hundred percent when he says he
didn’t do it. He’d never hurt anybody. He’s a good person—
not perfect, but who is? My brother didn’t do this.” I could tell she believed that. But her question about God
made me think that faith came easy to her. “What does that
have to do with God?” “I don’t know what really went down or where she’s been,”
Danielle said. “Believe me, the police tried to find her,
the investigator for Brad’s lawyer tried to find her—she
was gone. But then, all this time later, two days after
they scheduled Brad’s execution I see her? It had to be
for a reason.”
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