Customer Reviews

Missing

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Wes Holden has been through hell. Literally, He has faced life and death in Iraq, he is a special ops soldier, who has finally made it home. Suffering from Post Delayed Traumatic Stress he is trying to pull his life togather. Suddenly his wife and son are killed in a terrorist attack in the commissary at Ft Benning. Wes shuts down. After almost a year the military releases him to his half-brother. They don't think he will ever come out of the catatonic state he is in. However, left to his half-brothers care, he suddenly realizes he will die if he doesn't escape. So When Aaron Clancy leaves him to sit in a chair alone without anyone to feed or care for him, he rises, packs a bag and leaves.

Walking and hiding from most everyone he travels from Miami to West Virginia.He has been on the road almost a year. His mind torn and shattered, he finally walks out of some woods to hear a sweet voice singing a hymn.

Ally Munroe is the 28 year old daughter of Gidion Munroe. She has a limp and has taken care of her family since she was 16 when her mother died. She has just about given up on her hopes and dreams when the tall, ragged, sad faced man walks out of the woods. At first a little afraid she still offers him food and finally offers him a place to stay. She has inherited her uncle's litte cabin hidden in the woods.

With care and warmth she reaches out to the wounded animal that Wes has become. And Wes fighting and wrestling with his own dreams, or rather nightmares, slowly begins to open the door to his feelings which have been locked up so long.

What neither see is the evil that has come to these mountains. An evil from the city, full of greed and ego. An evil they will both have to fight.

Sharon Sala has given us a novel of all the emotions. I cried, I laughed. And at the end I was humbled. Do not miss this book.

When you have romantic suspense titled "Missing", you're bound to think missing child, or maybe missing woman. Surprise.

This is the story of a missing MAN. Colonel Wes Holden is a soldier who's seen too much, been through too much, and he decides he doesn't want to be himself anymore.

The heroine of the story is a plain, good woman in the hills of West Virginia. She lives with her family. She finds Wes one day, as he approaches her, asking for water. She recognizes something in him, and reaches out to catch him.

There is a strong story line to this book which has very little to do with the main characters. I find that kind of refreshing, and more than believable, since Wes has more than enough on his plate than to have to be the center of the other plot, also. The "bad guy" in the book is also well drawn and more than believable.

There is also an element to faith in this book, as there often is in Ms. Sala's books. If you're allergic to the idea of God, perhaps you'll find this annoying. I find it surprising, since so few romances outside "inspirational" ones dare tread in this direction. But it's not so overwhelming (as another reviewer has suggested) that you've got God jumping out at every other plot device. Rather, it's a realistic portrayal of rural Eastern church-going folk. I find it kind of refreshing that this part of the character is actually addressed.

All in all, a good read.


(*)>

Army sniper Wes Holden has returned from the Gulf to resume his family life with wife Margie and son Mikey. Their happiness is cut short when they both perish in a terrorist bombing on the base. Frantic to find them before its too late, he quickly dispatches the suicide bomber then collapses in grief. In his own world for nearly a year, he sees his chance for escape and lands in the rural West Virginia mountains. The kindness of Allie Monroe reignites his heart, when she offers him a place to stay on her family's property. After her mother's death, Allie resumed the role as caretaker to her two brothers and father, and now dad is trying to repay her by marrying her off to the first widower in need of a mama for his kids. But she has eyes only for Wes. Due to his many years as a soldier, Wes' heightened sense of awareness alerts him to impending danger and he performs nightly recons on the mountain to see what is going on. Little does Allie and her family know, but the geeky man that lives up the hill is actually creating a genetically engineered drug guaranteed to hook addicts, and he'll stop at nothing to keep his crop and the overabundance of dead animals around his property a secret. Especially when he discovers that his creation has mutated into something lethal.

Sala is a hit or miss for me, and often her books fall into the average category. This one started out above average, but quickly she resorted to gore in order to move the story along. Does a reader really need details on someone being gutted? However, I have never cried so much - Wes grief is agonizing to read about, and quite realistic. I also liked that she allowed a relationship to build between Allie and Wes before tossing them in bed together.

A well-written romantic-suspense novel. Although, the love story most common in Ms. Sala's books took a bit of a back seat in this story it was still a page-turner. I found some points in it a little gruesome but it made the plot more realistic in a sense.
Ms. Sala's characters are more believable. She presents the human nature at its best and worst as shown in Wes and Ally. Both have major physical and emotional flaws, but at the same time Ms. Sala shows that flaws could be surmounted with endurance.

Let me start off by saying I love Sharon Sala's( and her pin Dinah McCall too) books and I always hold her to a higher expectation than I do others...and let me say she was delivered above expectation. I started reading this book and could not put it down until I finished it. It is wonderful and without going into to much detail I tell you this book made me cry, it scared me, it made me worry becuase I happen to live on a US military base and it made me belive in the power of love winning against all odds.A++++++++++++++++ Excellent!

I am always pleased to see a new Sharon Sala novel, and this one is a winner. It's a realistic story of life in our perilous times and the cost our protectors pay. In our world of terrorism, sometimes only a special person and place can heal a wounded heart. When Wes Holden walks away from his tragedy, he didn't expect a spinster in the backwoods to be the key to returning to life. An interesting cast of charactors and a deadly danger keep the pace lively. I wish she had filled out the lesser charactors a little more, but this is an enjoyable read.

The book starts very dynamically, describing an officer who has only recently returned from a mission in Iraq and still suffers from PTSD. He realizes that he has offered himself completely to the military but has missed his wife and even more so the growing up of his little son. Sala describes how the father, Wes Holden, gets himself and his little family ready to return to the military base, where something horrible happens, which results in Wes losing his wife and son.

This part of the book was very emotional, the scenes between father and son described in an absolutely moving way. When disaster stroke and Wes loses his family I was close to crying. Very well done!

After being catatonic for some time, Wes plans and escapes a greedy family member who tries to financially exploit his situation. He starts wandering around and ends up in a forgotten place somewhere in West Virginia. So far so good, because after his arrival in that forgotten place, the book takes a downward slope: dreams come true, spiritual elements and visions as well as a lot of religious citations made me think that this is a book belonging to the category of Christian literature. In any case, the romance between Wes and Ally was very chaste, except for one scene where I had the impression that the author tried to escape the label of Christian literature by any means.

The suspense part of the book was unimpressive and amateurish. Surely this book had a lot of potential, which according to my opinion wasn't fully exploited. The end was entirely unelaborated and completely rushed as if the necessary page numbers were delivered and there was no more space to be filled. What a pity!

Romance, suspense, action and illegal activities all pulled together in this wonderfully written novel that will both capture your heart as well as keep you entertained until the very end. The villian is easily dislikable even though his identity is not a mystery. Still, it is an emotional roller coaster and well worth the read.

I couldn't put this book down. It's one of the best romantic suspense books I have read all year. I love her characters they are so real and well-written. The story is woven so well it keeps you turning pages till the very end. Definitely one I will recommend at my store to my customers. Also one I will re-read again.

For Colonel John Wesley Holden, a soldier in the Special Operations division of the Army, risking his life fighting terrorism in a desert thousands of miles away is part of his job. In the back of his mind, however, he's always wondered how safe he and his family are back in the United States. His wife, Margie, and his son, Mikey, are the only things that kept him sane during his months spent as a prisoner of war. When a man manages to infiltrate an Army base commissary and blows it to bits, causing the death of the only two people he's been able to love, Wes knows the truth-the enemy has followed him home.

Wes becomes lost in a near-comatose state; visions of past wars flicker constantly through his mind, his hold on reality is fragile at best, and is slipping away fast. It will take more than a miracle for this man to become anything like who he was in the past. It's not a miracle that forces him out of the hospital on a medical discharge, but it's nothing short of one, when he wanders aimlessly into Ally Monroe's backyard.

Ally is a late-twenties woman in a mid-forties body. She's tired, lonely, and fed-up with spending every minute of her day taking care of her widowed father and two middle-aged brothers. She dreams of a handsome, mysterious stranger walking out of the woods behind her house-he'd ask her for a drink of water, they'd fall madly in love, and her Prince Charming would rescue her from a life of catering to others.

When Wes Holden stumbles into her yard, asking for that drink of water, Ally is scared to death. How can this be? And how is it that the man she thought would rescue her seems to be the one needing rescuing? With an old woman giving her psychic cryptic messages, Wes ensconced in her dead dwarf uncle's cabin, and her brothers becoming odder and odder after working in the fields of a neighbor, life as Ally knows it is suddenly anything but ordinary.

MISSING is Ms. Sala's romantic suspense at its best. Strong emotions, vivid characters, and the underlying sense that all is not right make this a great book. I highly recommend it to all lovers of the genre.