She and her partner, Harry Burroughs, were working a sting to bring down Russian-American drug lord Viktor Orlov by way of local pharmacist and family man Owen Hopper, who stupidly got himself entangled with Orlov. Let's just say that things didn't go exactly as planned and now Laney has left it all behind her to make a new, quiet life with Alfie, her anti-social, stuttering, troubled son. Everything seems fine until one day when Alfie doesn't come home. The local cop, Ed Boswell, assures Laney he'll be back home soon, as he has done this before when he and Laney got in a big fight. But Laney is sure something is different this time and it turns out, she's right.
After a couple of days go by and there's no sign of Alfie, she is in a panic and calls her old partner, Harry, only to learn that he died a few days before. As she reaches out to her old boss, he says he needs to meet with her in person rather than discussing things over the phone and when she sees him, he's a shadow of his former self. It seems Laney's real identity as a cop might not have been as secret as she once thought and she could be in danger. Could this be tied to Alfie and the fact that he is missing, or is he just off on another anger bender? Getting to the bottom of this just may be the difference between life and death, but Laney will use every resource available to her from her current and former life to find her son. Lucky for her, best friend and neighbor, Holly Dubois, is right there to act as her partner in crime(solving) and she could use all of the help she can get.
I really enjoyed Hide in Place. I read it in three sittings and liked the way Naymark would bounce between Laney's current life and her former life as an undercover cop. She certainly has her share of difficulties between ex-husband Theo and her peculiar son Alfie, but what the family goes through in this book made me understand why she treats him with kid gloves in the next book, Behind the Lie. I highly recommend that you read them in order (which I didn't have the opportunity to do), but Emilya Naymark paints quite a picture with her words and I enjoy her as a writer. Check this book out if you are looking for a nail-biting thriller to read on a cold winter's day.
