Chasing Amanda

CHASING AMANDA

Listed on Amazon’s Top 100 Rated Fiction list and Top 100 Bestselling Kindle list for over 8 weeks!

“To say that this novel is sheer, literary brilliance is an understatement. This book will not let you down, nor will you be able to put it down.” ~ eNovel Reviews

“No matter what genre you normally read, Chasing Amanda should be added to your shelf. Chasing Amanda deserves five GOLDEN stars!” ~ Author Sass Cadeaux

Nine years ago, Molly Tanner witnessed a young girl’s abduction in the busy city of Philadelphia, shifting her occasional clairvoyance into overdrive. Two days later, the girl’s body was found, and Molly’s life fell apart. Consumed by guilt for not acting upon her visions, and on the brink of losing her family, Molly escaped the torturous reminders in the city, fleeing to the safety of the close-knit rural community of Boyds, Maryland.

Molly’s life is back on track, her son has begun college, and she and her husband have finally rekindled their relationship. Their fresh start is shattered when a seven-year-old girl disappears from a local park near Molly’s home. Unable to turn her back on another child and troubled by memories of the past, Molly sets out to find her, jeopardizing the marriage she’d fought so hard to hold together. While unearthing clues and struggling to decipher her visions, Molly discovers another side of Boyds, where the residents–and the land itself–hold potentially lethal secrets, and exposes another side of her husband, one that threatens to tear them apart.

Readers Round Table Review: Melissa Foster’s Chasing Amanda documents every parent’s nightmare: a child is missing from a public place where one minute she is standing with her mother and the next minute has vanished. What follows is a story of madness and mystery that drew me in from the first paragraph. The characters are fully drawn and believable. Even the most flawed person is multi-dimensional. The most heroic individual is also fighting her own demons. One woman’s nightmare is another woman’s desire and yet another woman’s wrong to right.

Chasing Amanda is a tale of love, retribution, hope and betrayal. I constantly had to think again, who is the monster here? Is it a stranger? A friend? A loved one? No one? Everyone? Is Molly crazy or gifted? The plot is complex and flows from one revelation to another, dividing into seemingly unrelated quests for truth and then bending and twisting back. Ms. Foster allows the reader to see the story unfold from many points of view, but she always makes it clear who is central to the scene, whose point of view we are witnessing. These multiple vantage points offer the reader clues as well as red herrings. There is a great deal of foreshadowing, which led me to experience “Ah ha!” moments many pages after reading what turns out to be an important detail. Chasing Amanda is a page turner that will leave you breathless and can’t be put down until the final period at the end of the final sentence.

This is Ms. Foster’s second novel and I look forward with great anticipation to more thrilling stories from this talented author.

Rated 5 Gold Crowns and a Recommended Read by Hazel!