May 062015
 

Cover for The Stolen Ones by Owen Laukkanen. A sinister photo of stacked, large metal cargo crates. One is open and empty.Associated Press: Owen Laukkanen’s “The Stolen Ones” concerns human trafficking and follows two Romanian sisters, Irina and Catalina, who have been kidnapped to sell as sex workers. Irina escapes, triggering a sequence of events that further threaten Catalina. Special Agent Kirk Stevens of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and his FBI partner Carla Windermere are called in to find the sister and the other kidnapped women. Language barriers (Irina speaks very little English) and a crew of slippery villains well-versed in police evasion make their job both difficult and, naturally, dangerous.

Laukkanen excels at writing relentlessly fast-paced action scenes, and this book is full of them, with exceptional final fight scenes.

Read the full AP review of The Stolen Ones here.