Losing Leah Holloway

Today's post is a book feature for Lisa Regan's new release, Losing Leah Holloway! If any of you read Lisa's books, this is the second book in the Claire Fletcher and Detective Parks Mystery Series. Finding Claire Fletcher is the first book in the series. I've read Finding Claire Fletcher years ago, and the book moved me to the point it took me several days to write a review. I knew Lisa was going places, so when she asked me to read the second in the series you know I jumped at the chance. Below is the blurb and cover, as well as my review for both Finding Claire Fletcher and Losing Leah Holloway. I've said it before and I'll say it again, Lisa Regan is the next Mary Higgins Clark with a mash up of Dean Koontz. 

Let's start with Finding Claire Fletcher. Both books are published by Thomas & Mercer! 

After finishing Finding Claire Fletcher I needed some time to absorb the story. Why? Because it was written so well, so truthfully and so filled with raw human emotion I needed time before I could put into words just how amazing this book is. As an avid suspense reader I knew there would be plenty of it in this story, what I wasn’t expecting was how well a first time author spun this tale. We are all familiar with the high profile kidnapping cases like Adam Walsh, Jacob Wetterling and Jessyca Mullenburg, but what Lisa Regan does is tell us the story of a girl who had high media attention and the story of the girls who do not. Claire Fletcher is loved by her family and her abduction at age 15 tears her family apart as they tried to go on not knowing if she was alive or dead. Her mother certain she was alive continued to fight to find her while everyone else thought the case was hopeless. Ten years later when men begin showing up at the door asking for their daughter Claire and swearing to have just spent the night with her the past continues to haunt them. With adept swiftness Ms. Regan switches back and forth from the real world to Claire’s world and you sit down beside her in the room she is held captive in as her abductor taunts her and you listen as she wonders if her family is looking for her or if they have given up. Should she keep fighting or should she just give up and let death take her? When Detective Connor Parks gets put on the desk he digs into the past files determined to find out the real truth and he unravels a sordid family secret of a pedophile no one could stop and a list of people missing or abused a mile long.

Finding Claire Fletcher contains so many secrets it is hard to review with no spoilers, so I will part ways with the story here and say this. You open this book expecting suspense, you close it with a whole new look on life. No more will you pass by the abducted child posters and not look at them with interest, no more will you see a young girl on the street and not wonder where is her mother and does anyone care about her and no more will you ever think “not my child.” Claire Fletcher is every child and Lisa Regan has told her story with respect and dignity. I can’t name one seasoned author who could have told this story with as much precision, emotion and well thought out story line or pulled it off as gracefully as Ms. Regan. If you love suspense this book is a must read, but more importantly if you love children this book is a must read. Kudos on a well told story Ms. Regan, I’ll be back for more.

Losing Leah Holloway on Amazon 

Five years ago, Claire Fletcher escaped her abductor. But some scars never fade, and surviving was just the beginning…
When Claire sees a car full of children careen into a river, she rushes to the rescue. But the driver, a mother named Leah Holloway, prefers to drown. For Claire and her ex, Detective Connor Parks, it doesn’t add up. What would motivate a woman with a beautiful family and a successful career to resort to such unspeakable extremes? What Connor finds out confirms Claire’s suspicions of something dreadful behind Holloway’s picture-perfect facade: a link between the terrified mother and a serial strangler targeting Sacramento soccer moms.

As Claire and Connor are drawn back together, their investigation leads them to unearth everything Holloway was hiding. What they find could be the only way to stop a killer from striking again.

As a very early reader of Finding Claire Fletcher, I knew from the first few pages Lisa Regan was a thrill writer unlike any we’ve seen in recent memory. I never dreamed I would one day see a second book involving Claire, but you can bet I was one of the first ones to get my hands on it. As expected, Ms. Regan did NOT disappoint me with the second installment of Claire and Connor. Let me tell you, the book opens with a bang and the pace is strong, fast-paced, twisted, and beautiful all the way to the end.

Five years after being rescued from her abductor, Claire has a new life. She’s finding her way back from the ordeal, check that, hell, she went through, and trying to live a normal life. She went to the river with her dog and her sister for a little R&R, but what she got was embroiled in a mystery that would once again endanger her life, and require her to work with her ex, Detective Connor Parks.
I’ve always thought Claire and Connor’s attraction was off the charts, and it was no different in this book, though it was a slow, deliberate advancement of their relationship. The author wrote their love story the only way it could be told; beautifully damaged, but worth fighting for.
Amid the story of Claire’s return to society is the story of Leah Holloway and her children. Why would a presumably happy woman, a mother who seems to have it all, try to kill her own children, not to mention the neighbor’s children. It wasn’t adding up and Connor was tasked with figuring out why before more women died.

Lisa Regan’s books are hard to review because almost every part of the book I want to include here would be considered a spoiler, and I refuse to give spoilers. Ms. Regan is a modern-day Mary Higgins Clark with a side of dark psychological thrill writing like that of Dean Koontz. You will never be disappointed in any of Ms. Regan’s books, but don’t take my word for it. You can read Losing Leah Holloway without reading Finding Claire Fletcher first, but I encourage you to read both, you won’t regret it!

Lisa Regan was born in Philadelphia, a product of two large Irish Catholic families whose roots run deep in her neighborhood. From the moment she was able to put words onto the page, she was writing: poems, stories, and even novels. At age eleven, her parents bought her a typewriter, on which she wrote her first full-length novel. By the time she was eighteen, she had written four terrible young adult novels. Between eighteen and twenty-two, she had a crisis of confidence and although she kept writing, she was unable to finish any novel-length projects. She spent her time working in bookstores while completing college. She spent two years at the Community College of Philadelphia before transferring to Bloomsburg University, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in English and a master of education degree. To make ends meet, she worked as both a certified nurse assistant and a karate instructor. 

In 2002 she finally finished her first adult novel, which remains on a flash drive in her nightstand. In 2006, she finished what would become her first published novel: Finding Claire Fletcher. After being passed over by more than 150 agents and then more than a dozen publishers, her first novel was published in December 2012, followed by her second novel, Aberration, in June 2013. Finding Claire Fletcher won Best Heroine and was runner-up for Best Novel in the 2013 eFestival of Words Best of the Independent eBook Awards. It was a finalist for the Kindle Book Review's Best Kindle Book Awards in 2014. In December 2013, the novel reached number one on Amazon’s Bestselling Kidnapping Crime Fiction list; in the same month, her second novel, Aberration reached number one on Amazon’s Serial Killer Crime Fiction Bestseller list. Lisa currently resides in Philadelphia with her husband and daughter where she works full time and works on her future novels while waiting in line at the local post office

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