Breathe Your Last by Lisa Regan

You all know how much I love Lisa Regan and her books! Today I'm featuring her newest release in the Josie Quinn Series, Breathe Your Last! This is book ten of the series, which is the halfway point! I've read Breathe Your Last and, as always, it's nail biting and edge of your seat suspense! I've put the read inside and my review below. I hope you have a chance to check it out!

The body of a young girl lying face down in a swimming pool—white tennis shoes still on her feet, chestnut hair fanned out like a halo—is the last thing Detective Josie Quinn expects to find on an early morning visit to see her brother before class at Denton University. But when she recognizes the girl’s face as she drags her limp body from the water, there’s only one question racing through Josie’s mind: how does a champion swimmer accidentally drown?
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Nysa Somers’ family are distraught. She was a model student, beloved daughter and everybody’s friend. There’s no way she would do anything reckless enough to put her scholarship at risk, let alone her life. It’s up to Josie and her team to piece together what happened in the hours leading up to Nysa’s death, and that begins with finding her missing backpack. But the bag, discarded in the woods on the nearby campus, contains nothing more than empty food wrappers, Nysa’s phone and a cryptic calendar entry telling her to be a mermaid.

The next day, a terrible housefire envelops the nearby home of a retired fireman, nearly killing his two granddaughters. The last words the little girls heard him mutter before he set the blaze were, be a match.
As the body count rises, it’s only Josie who can see the deadly pattern forming. Can she convince her team that the wrapper found in Nysa’s bag is the crucial link they’re missing? Josie knows she must go it alone if she’s going to stop this silent and calculated serial killer before any more precious lives are taken.

But with the killer finally in her sights, Josie takes a dangerous risk and finds herself hanging onto life by her fingernails. Can she trust her team to save her, and before it’s too late?

Breathe Your Last by Lisa Regan is a powerhouse Josie Quinn novel that builds on the greatness that is this series! You open each book in the series never quite knowing what to expect, and that’s one of the things I love about Ms. Regan’s writing. When Breathe Your Last opens, you are immediately creeped out, and you can’t help but love every single word of the killer’s prologue. There is nothing I love more than getting into the head of the killer and Ms. Regan does that with a steady, creepy hand throughout the whole of the book.

The book opens with Josie dropping Harris off at his new 4-year-old kindergarten class and then heading to her brother’s college to read him the riot act for being careless with his laundry. When she arrives at his work, the school pool, she forgets about her anger at him when she finds a young college student floating in the pool. When her revival efforts fail, Josie’s new case is never more apparent. How did the university’s top swimmer drown in a pool wearing her street clothes? Josie, Mett, Noah, and Gretchen set out to discover if it was a tragic mistake or if there was something more sinister behind it. Let’s face it, this is a Lisa Regan book, of course, there is something more sinister behind it!

As is always the case with Ms. Regan, every single word matters to the twisting, turning, loop-de-loop mystery that is a Josie Quinn book, and this one is no different. Once again, Josie finds herself in situations that are life and death on a daily basis. First, she must rescue a young girl from a burning house that, if you believe the girls who escaped the fire, their grandfather set. Their grandfather who was a celebrated Denton firefighter. Something was amiss in Denton and it all revolved around a baggie full of brownies, and a sticker that no one could decipher or attribute to anyone.

It’s smart to never count Josie out, though. Even without any leads, she will keep fraying at the end of the rope until that single thread she needs shows itself. In this case, she’s able to use the people closest to her to get the lead she needs. Surprisingly, it comes from her brother Patrick, a Denton University student who has inside knowledge of the things that have gone on there the past few years. I truly enjoyed this part of the book because it was nice to see Josie getting to know Patrick as a sister, and not a cop. She’s listening to him and seeing that he’s a good kid who even when he does bonehead things like turn her shirts pink in the wash, is smart, capable, and this time had the break she needed to find that thread to unravel.

I loved seeing Josie grow and move forward in her personal life in this book. The reader got to see a little bit of her vulnerability when things weren’t going right, both with the case and with Noah. Josie likes to pretend she’s a robot, but in the end, she’s not, and it was nice to see that she’s starting to admit to herself that she needs people around her who love and support her.

Breathe Your Last has such an intricate plot of connections that you won’t guess this one until Ms. Regan starts unraveling it for you page by page. The ending will shock you, and leave your heart pounding until the final page! Well done, Ms. Regan, once again you’ve written a can’t put it down thriller that elevates this series to the likes of Sue Grafton, Michael Connelly, Karen Slaughter, and James Patterson.

Lisa Regan is an Amazon bestselling suspense novelist. Her titles include Finding Claire Fletcher, Losing Leah Holloway, Hold Still, Cold-Blooded, Kill For You, and Vanishing Girls. Lisa is a member of Sisters In Crime, International Thriller Writers, and Mystery Writers of America. She has a Bachelor's Degree in English and Master of Education Degree from Bloomsburg University. She lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the U.S. with her husband, daughter, and Boston Terrier named Mr. Phillip.

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