Every Precious Thing by Brett Battles

Alan Lindley’s world is tuned upside down when his wife, Sara, disappears while they are on a quick getaway to celebrate both their wedding anniversary and his formal adoption of Sara’s young daughter.

His panic turns to confusion when he finds a note left by Sara assuring him her disappearance is for the best and that he shouldn’t try to find her. Convinced Sara is in some kind of danger, and with the police unwilling to look for an adult who has seemingly left of their own accord, Alan goes to his attorney for help.

It’s Alan’s good fortune that his attorney, Callie Johnson, is friends with Logan Harper, a former military man and private security contractor. Though Logan is sure it’s merely a case of an unhappy wife who’s bailed out of the marriage, he agrees to look into the matter as a favor to Callie.

Almost immediately is becomes clear things are more complicated than that when Logan discovers that all documentation of Sara’s history comes to an abrupt end only a few years back.

Enlisting the help of a few friends who are also ex-military, Logan follows Sara’s trail back as far as he can. Using her phone records he’s able to determine Sara made trips to a small town on the other side of the state. When Logan and friends turn up and start asking questions they’re met with a violent response that removes any doubts Logan may have had about Sara’s disappearance: she’s running from something, it just isn’t her marriage. Now the question is whether Logan can find her before whatever – or whoever – she’s running from does.

The first entry in the Logan Harper series, Little Girl Gone, was non-stop action that found Logan on a globetrotting adventure. In Every Precious Thing author Brett Battles has toned down the action a bit, putting more emphasis on suspense and character development. In addition to following Logan’s progress tracking Sara, Battles also provides the reader with the perspectives of both Sara and the person responsible for Sara’s flight. As the pieces of the puzzle are slowly revealed through those three perspectives a truly disturbing picture begins to emerge, one that more than explains why Sara walked out on her husband and young daughter.

Interwoven throughout the larger story is a nice subplot involving Logan and his dad, Harp. Battles brings the two closer together, and pays tribute to soldiers who’ve gone MIA, by having Harp confront his long bottled up emotions about his brother, who disappeared while on a bombing run during World War II. Harp’s group of friends, who affectionately call themselves the Wise Ass Old Men, or WAMO (yes, they know the M and O are reversed, thank you very much), also put in an appearance to break the tension and add a bit of snappy, sarcastic dialog and a bit of comic relief.

Battles has become a very prolific author of late, with no fewer than three different series going: Jonathan Quinn, Logan Harper, and Project Eden (book two, Exit 9, coming at the end of this month). This is not crank it out, cookie cutter writing, however. Though they are all thriller based, each series definitely has a distinct feel, and just to mess with everyone’s head Battles pulled off a serious change of gears with his recent outstanding standalone literary offering, The Pull of Gravity. Rumor has it he’s even written a YA book, Here Comes Mr. Trouble, though I’ve not found time to run that one to ground. He’s pretty much the Energizer Bunny® of authors. But I’m not complaining. After all, a discerning reader can never have too much Brett Battles.

Every Precious Thing is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords.