Review: 'The Stolen Ones,' by Owen Laukkanen

There's a lot to like about Owen Laukkanen's latest thriller, "The Stolen Ones."

First there's special agent Kirk Stevens of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension investigating a murder near Leech Lake that triggers a hunt for sex traffickers. There are two Romanian sisters: Irina, who risks her life to rescue Catalina, and Catalina, who wouldn't need rescuing if Irina hadn't been "stupid" and "gullible."

There's the driving narrative (with a breathless finale) about the horrors of the sex-slave trade, and how thousands of women arrive in containers at the same ports as our produce, distributed along the same Midwest roads we travel.

Unfortunately, there's also a lot not to like in "The Stolen Ones."

There's a band of Eastern European traffickers whose leader, Dragon, might as well twirl a thin black mustache. There's Stevens' FBI partner, Windermere, whose frequent browbeating of her co-worker Derek about his mistakes (while she anguishes over her feelings for him like "some lovestruck teenager") reduces her to the same level as Stevens' hormonally charged 16-year-old daughter.

There's a familiarity in the plot's structure to Laukkanen's first two thrillers, and even Stevens wonders "how a Minnesota state cop [keeps finding] himself in this kind of predicament." I wondered that, too.

CAROLE E. BARROWMAN