She Treads Softly: Not Who We Expected

Saturday, February 1, 2025

Not Who We Expected

Not Who We Expected by Lisa Black
2/25/25; 320 pages
Kensington
Locard Institute #4

Not Who We Expected by Lisa Black is a very highly recommended investigative thriller and the fourth novel in the Locard Institute series. This can be enjoyed as a standalone novel, but the whole series is definitely worth reading.

Locard Institute forensic experts Ellie Carr and Rachael Davies are contacted by legendary rock star Billy Diamond to find his missing daughter, Devon. She and her boyfriend Carlos, had left Yale six months earlier to take some time off. They went to a career development retreat called Today’s Enlightenment in Nevada and contact between Devon and Billy dwindled away to nothing. Then Carlos's body is found a few miles away from the ranch in the Truckee river and Billy wants to know his daughter is okay.

Ellie goes undercover to join the isolated retreat and find Devon. She quickly understands that the retreat is a cult and attendees follow every word and order from their leader, Galen. In the meantime, Rachel is working with Billy to learn more about Devon and her deceased sister, Isis. Billy knew Isis and she was the reason he contacted Rachel to find his daughter.

As expected the writing is excellent and the fast-paced plot is engaging and increasingly tense. Both Ellie experiences and activities in the cult and Rachel's look into Isis's past are compelling and interesting. Ellie's experiences increasingly indicate a dangerous situation, while Rachel discovers unexpected information about her sister. Black includes an informative afterward concerning cults and additional reading material about them as well as quotes from some cult survivors at the beginning of each new section.

Ellie and Rachel are fully realized, intelligent, complex strong female characters. Having read the previous Locard Institute novels, I know these characters and their past cases but new readers should be able to easily follow the plot without this prior knowledge.

Not Who We Expected is an excellent investigative thriller and I'm eagerly anticipating another future installment of the Locard Institute series. Thanks to Kensington for providing me with an advance reader's copy via NetGalley. My review is voluntary and expresses my honest opinion.

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John Updike's six rules for reviewing:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation--at least one extended passage--of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser.....Review the book, not the reputation.... Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.