Boston PI Carlotta Carlyle is doing some “big digging” of her own in this 11th adventure. This time, however, the case is a very personal one. Paolina, Carlotta’s teenaged “Little Sister” whom she loves like a daughter, has disappeared and no one except Carlotta seems to care. Carlyle, a part-time taxi driver and part-time PI is very believable in her native Boston as she struggles with her relationship with Mafioso Sam Gianelli. Unfortunately, she doesn’t seem to travel well. It doesn’t take long for Carlyle to begin to suspect that Paolina didn’t run away on her own, but was in fact kidnapped. She hopes the kidnappers were in the employ of Paolina’s biological father, a Colombian drug lord known as Roldan. However, there is the possibility that it was enemies of Roldan who engineered the snatch. Carlotta travels first to Miami and tracks down Roldan’s lawyer and from there it is on to Bogota. While well written, as were previous Carlyle adventures, it is here that the story begins to break down a bit. With her height and red hair, Carlotta fits pretty well into Irish dominated Boston. In Bogotá both work against her, even though she conveniently speaks Spanish. In the midst of all this Sam decides to propose to Carlotta, which leads to an emotional ending that screams for a sequel soon. Overall another good entry from Ms. Barnes, but I would suggest that future adventures remain fueled on New England clam chowder.

Linda Barnes deftly ties together kidnapping, drug dealing, corruption, and native mysticism in this latest Carlotta Carlyle novel. As she searches for her missing "sister," Carlotta must face dangereous situations and work with dangerous men without being able to fully trust anyone's motives. The plot is fast-moving and the story exciting.

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3 stars due to the subject matter not the content!

I don't like books revolving around the South American drug trade or the mafia and this book had both. Without reading the flyleaf, I picked this up because I like the Carlotta Carlyle series.

Carlotta "little sister" Paolini is kidnapped and Carlotta chases clues from Boston to Miami and finally to Colombia. It's a really good book if you can get past all the drug references and the guerrilla fighters.

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