The Wrong Girl

By: Hank Phillippi Ryan

Narrated by: Ilyana Kadushin

Length: 13 hrs and 20 mins

Publisher's Summary

Award-winning and Boston Globe best-selling author Hank Phillippi Ryan presents a spine-chilling, heart-wrenching suspense novel that explores a terrifying scenario striking at the heart of every family.

Does a respected adoption agency have a frightening secret? Tipped off by a determined ex-colleague on a desperate quest to find her birth mother, Boston newspaper reporter Jane Ryland begins to suspect that the agency is engaging in the ultimate betrayal - reuniting birth parents with the wrong children.

For detective Jake Brogan and his partner, a young woman’s brutal murder seems a sadly predictable case of domestic violence, one that results in two toddlers being shuttled into the foster care system. Then Jake finds an empty cradle at the murder scene. Where is the baby who should have been sleeping there?

Jane and Jake are soon on a trail full of twists and turns that takes them deep into the heart of a foster care system in crisis and threatens to blow the lid off an adoption agency scandal. When the threatening phone calls start, Jane knows she is on the right track... but with both a killer at large and an infant missing, time is running out...

The Wrong Girl is a riveting novel of familial relationships - both known and unknown - vile greed, senseless murder, and the ultimate in deception. What if you didn’t know the truth about your own family?

Includes a bonus interview with Hank Phillippi Ryan

©2013 Hank Phillippi Ryan (P)2013 Macmillan Audio

Overworked child services leads to greed & murder

This second book in the Investigative reporter, Jane Ryland, series is greatly aided by the knowledge that Hank Phillippi Ryan, a TV reporter herself, has in how a story is developed through personal investigations, police procedurals, and keeping all your sources available for inside information.

Jane is working for a floundering Boston newspaper when her friend, Tucker, asks her to help her. Tucker has been matched up with her birth mother and they are getting along beautifully, until Tucker finds out that she's been matched with the wrong woman. At the same time, Jane's boss sends her out on a story of a murdered woman, also being investigated by her secret boyfriend, Jake, on the Boston police force. These investigations slowly collide in a larger investigation of the Brannigan Agency that matches adoptees and birth mothers, the foster care system, Child Services, and greedy individuals.

The pace and building atmosphere of this story are superb in creating great tension and plot that made me feel that I was deeply involved with these people's lives. The problems that are present in the extremely overworked child and foster care system were aptly used in creating a very believable, but deeply troubling plot for this mystery. Definitely a memorable book. I listened to this on audio and believe that added a great deal to my enjoyment of this book !

Grammar rules so not apply

I’ve never written a review before, but this one was just too much.
The narrator takes the most absurd pauses while reading, at times where pauses should not be made in the sentence. It was so incredibly distracting! Grammar rules should be followed, and pauses taken when a punctuation mark indicates. This is basic!!!!
The story, eye roll, good heavens. So much exposition where it is not needed. I do not need to know every adjective there is to tell me what the insignificant couch looks like. I can’t even understand how this got published. The way the narrator read the story, or probably how it was written too, made the whole thing obvious.
It felt like torture forcing myself to finish this.

Multiple storylines converge for an excellent read

Multiple mysteries draw you in and as Jane pulls the threads to figure out where they lead, she finds herself entwined in a large knot of inconsistencies that keep her pulling for the truth. Unfortunately she is also following the threads into greater peril with someone who obviously does not want her to find the truth. Well plotted and intriguing to keep you entertained, but the characters definitely make the stories come to life and keep you wanting more. I can't wait to listen to the next book in the series!