All the Missing Pieces by Catherine Cowles

Sometimes the last thing you expect is exactly what you need, the final missing piece. And sometimes it comes in the form of a towering, broody sheriff, determined to get in your way at every step.

Ridley Sawyer knows what it’s like to miss someone, to feel like a piece of her vanished—because it happened to her the night her twin sister disappeared.

Now, Ridley channels that loss into hope, traveling the country covering cold cases for her true crime podcast. She might not have found justice for her sister but that doesn’t stop her from finding it for others.

Until Sheriff Colter Brooks gets in her way.

Colt knows what it’s like to have reporters descend on his town in the wake of a tragedy, and he’s not about to let a fiery podcaster stir up trouble. It doesn’t matter that her haunting blue eyes tell him there’s more to Ridley’s story or that he can’t stop imagining what it would be like to touch her.

But when Ridley’s cold case turns hot and she’s thrust into the crosshairs, Colt has no choice but to step in. Suddenly, Ridley’s living at his house, drinking his whiskey, and stealing his dog’s affections. But she’s also proving that she’s so much more than his first impression.

And as they get closer to the truth, the game they’ve been playing might just turn deadly…

**WARNING: This review contains spoilers. I don’t give away who the killer is or anything like that, but if you’re planning on reading this book you might feel like I’ve shared a bit more about certain parts of the plot than you’d like.**

I adore romantic suspense. It’s one of my favorite genres ever, yet it’s so hard to find really good ones. All the Missing Pieces started off great, and I quickly became invested in the story of Ridley’s true crime podcast and the search for her twin sister’s killer. But then everything began to fall apart for me, and I think the dialogue shoulders a massive piece of the blame for that. It was so, so cheesy. I really hate the main couple’s pet names for each other, “Law Man” and “Chaos”. If my man decided to call me “Chaos” as a term of endearment I’d be gone. Their dialogue read like a bad Hallmark mystery.

And then the writing… I cringed. It’s so bad. Colt talks all the time about how Ridley smells like burnt oranges. Ok so… let me just grab this orange and throw it in a campfire and that’s the smell that has him falling all over himself? He says her scent “clings to the walls”. I’m picturing how my microwave still smells like the popcorn I burned a year ago. Not so appealing. Ridley mentions his scent just as often: bergamot and cloves. Ummmm? I could identify a hint of cloves in the air because I love Thanksgiving, but bergamot? I had to google what bergamot smells like, and I don’t know many people, apart from fragrance enthusiasts, who could randomly identify that scent on a person. I read it smells citrusy. How could Ridley even pick out the bergamot if she smells like campfire oranges all the time? What man, who sees the same woman every day for several weeks, would notice that her hair looked blonder than usual because she’d been outside more? That’s the weirdest observation to me! It’s cold out and her lifestyle hasn’t changed since arriving in this town so why has her hair lightened enough to notice, seemingly overnight? Ridley is constantly lamenting her nipples. They stand at attention or harden whenever Colt so much as breathes, and those “traitorous peaks” sure do cause her trouble. She talks about them all the time. I’m cringing again just remembering it. But I think my final undoing with the writing was this quote:

“He understood the colors I painted my world with because he spoke the language of my pain.”

Ok, really think about that sentence. What on earth does it even mean? The colors of her world… the language of her pain… It’s so purple prose, yet it does nothing for the reader. That sentence is there for the purpose of making the reader gasp at its beauty(?), but it seriously means nothing. I rolled my eyes so hard they almost fell out of my head.

Moving on to the characters. They both lack personality. Colter needs to go to anger management. I’m a little worried about a cop who is so angry, and so filled with rage all the time. Seriously, all the time. He treats his adult younger sister like a child and is so overprotective that she’s scared to live her life. He was so unbelievably rude to Ridley at their first meeting (for no reason), and continued to be so for a long time. How could anyone trust him as a cop when this is his personality? He goes from pure hatred to all-consuming lust to… love? And then he becomes very controlling and smothering. Ridley has been living in a van for years, trekking across the country alone, interviewing potential criminals, etc. and yet Colter thinks her completely incapable of taking care of herself. He gets so mad if she does anything he deems unsafe. In his defense, Ridley does do a lot of dumb things. It’s hard to believe her experience level because she really is too stupid to still be alive. I mean, she showers behind a curtain outside her van. Colter manhandles her all the time, picking her up like a doll and placing her in his lap if ever he thinks she needs him. She must be the tiniest human being in the world for how easily he does this. Their romance is very boring. I felt nothing for these two. No swoons, no heart flutters, no nothing. The relationship went through no development at all and then, after knowing each other for only a few weeks (most of which were spent hating each other), the L-bomb was dropped during a time of intense emotional turmoil. I didn’t even believe it. The spicy scenes were awkward and one in particular seemed completely impossible.

There was no real suspense or actual investigation of the crime. I can’t see how Ridley has ever solved a cold case, with how little she does on the page with this one. She films b-roll and snippets for Instagram and she goes to the school library to look at old yearbooks. That’s about it. The book mentions that a lot of research has already been done, and there’s countless numbers of files and documentation of various crimes, but we’re told about so little of it. How did Ridley connect all these cases? How was she the one to figure out that this guy is a serial killer? I wanted actual information, not to just be told that there is information. I wanted suspects and stories and information about other victims. This murderer is a serial kidnapper and killer. He’s left at least 23 victims in his wake, completely eluding law enforcement for over a decade. And then everything is tied up neatly in a bow after one of the weakest revelations I’ve seen. I read some reviews where people were like, “I had no idea who did it until the very end!!” Well, that makes sense because the author gives no hints or information that would help anyone even begin to make assumptions as to who did it. There was no foreshadowing or setting up the framework for this murderer. And that’s because this is really a very flimsy case. If any clues were given, we’d know immediately how it was going to end.

Andi Arndt is one of my favorite narrators, and she did a great job. I loved listening to her. Sebastian York and I have a love-hate relationship. I’ve loved some of his narrations over the years, but I think his portrayal of Colter in this book was part of why it didn’t work for me. Sebastian has a very strong, gruff, sarcastic voice and that might have been when made Colter sound so mad all the time. The author made sure we knew how angry Colter was with her word choices (he was always grinding his back teeth together and seething and fuming), but Sebastian’s voice brought life to it and made me unable to use my own inner voice to keep Colter’s character calm in my head. He was just always so mad and I grew exhausted listening to him. There’s also gratuitous swearing, which was made more obvious by the audio version.

I know I’m in the minority, as this book is very highly rated on Goodreads and I have many friends who loved it. I should have DNFed, but I wanted to know who the bad guy was (and it wasn’t worth it). This was not my first Catherine Cowles book, but I do think it’s going to be my last. Unfortunately, her books just aren’t the right fit for me. And that makes me sad, because she’s a very prolific author with unique-sounding plots that aren’t either paranormal or all about SEALs/former military/security company owner male leads, as is the case with so many romantic suspense books. The hunt continues!

Do you have any romantic suspense recommendations for me?