Unstuck Pages

Noah Marshall has known a privileged and comfortable life thanks to his mother, the highly decorated chief of the Austin Police Department. But all that changes the night she reveals a skeleton that's been rattling in her closet for years, and succumbs to the guilt of destroying an innocent family's life. Reeling with grief, Noah is forced to carry the burden of this shocking secret.

Gracie Richards wasn't born in a trailer park, but after fourteen years of learning how to survive in The Hollow, it's all she knows anymore. At least here people don't care that her dad was a corrupt Austin cop, murdered in a drug deal gone wrong. Here, she and her mother are just another family struggling to survive...until a man who clearly doesn't belong shows up on her doorstep.

Despite their differences, Noah and Gracie are searching for answers to the same questions, and together, they set out to uncover the truth about the Austin Police Department's dark and messy past. But the scandal that emerges is bigger than they bargained for, and goes far higher up than they ever imagined.

With an apparent suicide that sparks off a civilian-run investigation, K.A Tucker plunges us straight into a fascinating case of deep rot in a police department, the layers of cover-ups and complicity at all levels. That much, ‘Keep Her Safe’ is a solid thriller/suspense as Noah Marshall and Grace Richards try to untangle threads that many have tried to sever in a 14-year-old mystery. Tucker pours out theories, doubts upon doubts, throws in several signposts and red-herrings while piling on the emotion—all of which did keep me engaged until the end. Well, mostly.

At 400 pages, ‘Keep Her Safe’ ran the risk of being bloated, along with the slow burn of a romance that thankfully, didn’t exactly detract from the plot. Told in several POVs, straddling different timelines, this was drawn out much more than I thought it would, as it soon became clear (halfway into it at least) who the major, dirty players were.

That much I liked, as cynical as the plot is, about a broken justice system where evasion and conspiracy (and deliberately not doing the right thing) seem the reigning themes of this procedural.

Character-wise however…oh lord, how I loathed Grace—a hormonal teenager masquerading as an adult.

Petulant and petty, with an uncontrollable temper, with a bull-headed tendency to rush into everything—and blaming everyone else for everything not going right—Grace’s large chip on her shoulder was so blindingly big that it was impossible to like her at all. It always felt that she was the self-righteous one, while Noah always fumbled in his missteps and had the uphill climb to appease her ‘world-owes-me-big’ attitude. I get it—she’s had a hard life. But behaving at every turn like the world owes her everything for that while trampling everyone and anyone because of her circumstances? Didn’t get too much sympathy from me here.

Noah’s restraint in contrast, was a cool balm of relief, though I got annoyed and tired with the number of times he had to keep her flaring temper and her inability to even sit and think rationally. That he had to keep placating her made him like a caretaker of an unruly child instead of a romantic interest.

That said, K.A Tucker isn’t quite an author on my regular feed, though I’m guessing she should be. While I couldn’t (or rather, didn’t) buy into the romance at all, ‘Keep Her Safe’ is more than a decent read even though I took days to finish it.