She Treads Softly: Three Girls Gone

Monday, August 18, 2025

Three Girls Gone

Three Girls Gone by Carolyn Arnold
8/27/25; 343 pages
Bookouture
Detective Amanda Steele #14

Three Girls Gone by Carolyn Arnold is an excellent, very highly recommended police procedural. Even though this is the fourteenth novel in the Detective Amanda Steele series, there is enough backstory to easily read it as a standalone. Arnold writes great procedurals.

The body of six-year-old Hailey Tanner is found dressed in a pink ballerina tutu on the carousel in a local park. Detective Amanda Steele and her partner Trent Stenson rush to the scene and begin the investigation. They learn that Hailey wasn't picked up after dance class after her nanny received a phone call saying Hailey's mother would be picking her up. While searching her room at the family home, Amanda discovers one of Hailey's tutus and a pair of slippers have been taken from the home. It is clear that her abduction was carefully planned.

It also becomes increasingly similar to the Julie Gilbert, a child abduction and murder case from twelve years ago. Katherine Graves, Amanda's former colleague, is still conducting her own, private investigation into this case. A note is found that ties Hailey's murder to Katherine's investigation of the Gilbert case, so she joins them to share her discoveries.

This is an excellent, very well written, fast-paced police procedural that carefully follows clues and discoveries. The tension increases with each new discovery as the plot logically leads Amanda and Trent to new suspects, lines of inquiry, and revelations. Both Amanda and Trent are intelligent, fully realized characters, and it is always a pleasure to see them investigate a case.

Three Girls Gone is a well-written, fast-paced, engaging, intelligent police procedural which will hold your attention from start to finish. This is an excellent choice for readers who enjoy procedurals. Thanks to Bookouture 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.