#BookReview Before It's Too Late by Sara Driscoll @KensingtonBooks

Before It's Too Late by Sara Driscoll
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In this powerful K-9 crime thriller, FBI Special Agent Meg Jennings and her trusted search-and-rescue Labrador, Hawk, must race against the clock before a diabolical killer strikes again…

Somewhere in the Washington, D.C., area, a woman lies helpless in a box. Beneath the earth. Barely breathing. Buried alive. In Quantico, the FBI receives a coded message from the woman’s abductor. He wants to play a game with them: decipher the clues, find the grave, save the girl. The FBI’s top cryptanalysts crack the code, and Special Agent Meg Jennings and her K-9 partner, Hawk, scramble to follow a trail of false leads to the scene of the crime. By the time they solve the puzzle, it’s too late. But the killer’s game is far from over . . .

Soon another message arrives. Another victim is taken, and the deadly pattern is repeated—again and again. Each kidnapping triggers another desperate race against time, each with the possibility of another senseless death. That’s when Meg decides to try something drastic. Break the Bureau’s protocol. Bring in her brilliant sister, Cara, a genius at word games, to decipher the kidnapper’s twisted clues. Meg knows she’s risking her career to do it, but she’s determined not to let one more person die under her and Hawk’s watch. If the plan fails, it could bite them in the end. And if it leads to the killer, it could bury them forever . . .

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Before it's too Late is the sequel to Lone Wolf, which I haven't read, but that's in my Want-To-Read-List. So, when I got the chance to read this book did I grab it to see if the series is any good.

You don't have to have read Lone Wolf to read this book. The events in the previous books are mentioned, but this story is stand-alone. It's a fascinated case, where the kidnapper leaves messages that have to be deciphered in time to save the women taken. If too much time is spent on deciphering the message, well then it's over for the woman. And, the clues are not always that easy. Luckily, Meg knows someone that is great with word games, her sisters Cara.

I quite like this book. I adore reading crime novels with dogs, and in this case is Hawk one of the "main characters" in the book as he is a search-and-rescue dog. And, Hawk and the other search-and-rescue dogs are needed in this case as they often only have the locations to where the woman is and have to search to find her before it's too late. And, yes I liked the humans too (lol). FBI Special Agent Meg Jennings who is Hawk's owner and also the one that is taunted by the kidnapper in this book. It's easy to like Meg and I will definitely try to get hold of Lone Wolf to read what happened in that book. Cara.

It's a fast-paced book that only took a couple of hours for me to read, but that was very nice to read something "lighter". I felt that this is a perfect book when I want something less heavy, but not too light to read.

I want to thank the publisher for providing me with a free copy through NetGalley for an honest review!