And There He Kept Her

Moehling trods well-traveled ground in his lackluster debut set in Sandy Lake, Minn. Teens Jesse Crawford and Jenny Wheeler hope to score prescription painkillers by burglarizing the home of an old man they expected to be unconscious at 4:30 a.m. But the man, Emmett Burr, catches them and guns down Jesse and seriously wounds Jenny. Burr, who has created a room in his basement to hold women he’s abducted before, confines Jenny there. The girl’s disappearance alarms her mother, who contacts a cousin of hers, Ben Packard, the acting county sheriff. The story alternates between Packard’s investigation and Jenny’s peril, as she’s threatened both by a creepy partner of her captor who raped his previous abductees and looming insulin shock. Packard’s backstory—his male lover, a fellow cop, was killed on the job—and his current efforts to find solace with another man don’t add anything to the by-the-numbers plot, and the characters come across more as types than people. Other writers have done a better job with the same setup. Agent: Barbara Poelle, Irene Goodman Agency. (June)