NOW YOU SEE ME...

Freelance reporter Molly Blume (Dream House, 2003, etc.) searches for the missing daughter of the rabbi she idolized until he betrayed her.

When you’re an orthodox rabbi whose daughter has run away from home, you’re not anxious to broadcast her departure. So instead of calling the LAPD, Chaim Bailor, the religious-studies principal of Torah Tzion, asks his brother-in-law, Reuben Jastrow, to join Molly’s true-crime book tour, where Molly takes him for a stalker. Molly’s not eager to help Rabbi Bailor, who withheld his support years ago when she was accused of cheating in his class. Now Hadassah, his own daughter, is in trouble. Though she’s phoned home to say that she’s fine, the evidence hints that the man she ran off with is forming a murder-suicide pact. Delving into the dark teen world of cheating, computer chat rooms, self-mutilation and sexual harassment, Molly links Dassie to history teacher Greg Shankman, who was fired from Torah Tzion for reasons that remain disturbingly murky. The family is overjoyed when Dassie returns to them late one night. But she’s escaped a terrible fate only to become the primary suspect in a murder case that will entangle Molly with Det. Jessie Drake, from Krich’s alternate franchise (Shadows of Sin, 2001, etc.).

Despite a tangled plot and a muffled killer, Krich puts a sure finger on the painful spots where ordinary kids’ problems turn into murderous melodrama—all at a bargain price.