Girls Like Us by Cristina Alger

(Spoilers Ahead)

I received a copy of Girls Like Us from my Girly Book Club's Book Trib giveaway.  It was my first book by this author and I enjoyed it.  It was set on Long Island.  The main character, Nell, is an FBI agent with the Behaviorial Analysis Unit (BAU) who is home in Long Island following the death of her father.  Her father was a homicide detective with the Suffolk County Sheriff's Office.  He had spent all of Nell's life on the force and as a result, she was really part of the "family" of cops.  Her father died in a motorcycle accident that was presumed to be the result of a mix of drinking too much and wet roads. 

While Nell is in town, one of the local cops (Lee) asks Nell to consult on a homicide case that just occurred. It appears that this may be a serial killer as the way the girls were killed and their bodies disposed of was very similar.  As she starts to investigate she uncovers some inconsistencies that lead her to start to suspect that her father may have been involved in the murders. 

Nell's mother was also murdered when she was 7 years old and her father was a suspect in that briefly.  However Nell and her father were camping in the woods that night and she was her father's alibi. 

All of it starts to compile and this becomes a great story of who to trust and who did it.  You are pretty sure some of the cops are corrupt but you don't know which ones.  You definitely are lead to believe that her father was on the wrong side of law in some capacity after you learn that he was receiving money from a limo service into an account in the Cayman Islands. 

I got pulled into the story quickly and finished the book in just a few hours.  Ultimately, you find out that her father had managed to gain the trust of the corrupt cops enough to get in and was planning on blowing up the operation from the inside out.  These corrupt police officers were working with a very wealthy Hamptons resident to basically traffic underage prostitutes for sex parties involving very high profile guests (think senators, judges, VP's, etc). 

Nell's father had put up a girl in an apartment that Nell had been trying to track down. Once she locates her you find out that this girl was his daughter.  Apparently he had briefly went out with a woman after Nell's mother died and that woman got pregnant and never told him.  So he had only learned of the daughter very late in his life and had not had the chance to tell Nell yet.

The younger cop, Lee, turned out to be undercover FBI - so a good guy - but unfortunately he gets blown up by a car bomb towards the end of the novel. 

All the bad guys get busted and the story ends with Nell still hanging around Long Island doing some fixer-upper type work to her father's home and still contemplating what she was going to do long term with it.  She did ultimately end up accepting a job joining the FBI's sex trafficking group having found a passion for assisting the innocent victims of these crimes.

Rating ⭐⭐⭐⭐