ANYBODY’S DAUGHTER, the story of a teenage girl’s abduction into a forced ring of prostitution in Los Angeles, starts off in high gear and manages to create a believable, if occasionally message-heavy, story. Against the orders of her mother, Brianna is text-messaging a boy she met on Facebook to arrange a meet-up. The boy turns out to be a fictional creation of a ring of child sex traffickers who promptly abduct Brianna and begin to get ready to “turn her out.” Brianna’s uncle Dre, whose drug-dealing past has made him intimately familiar with the sleazy nuances of crime, quickly starts shaking down connections old and new in a race to find Brianna before she is permanently traumatized. Brianna endures brutal violence and watches other girls being forced to perform sex acts while Dre desperately searches for her.
As the second entry in the Angela Evans series, ANYBODY’S DAUGHTER, blends the street smarts of Dre with the seasoned intelligence of lawyer Angela Evans. The prose is fast-paced, taut, and never lets an emotionally wrenching opportunity pass unexplored. This is a book about the horrors of sex trafficking in a major U.S. city, as well as a treatise about the poor self-esteem and culture of ingrained abuse in so many poverty-stricken families. As a thriller, it ably holds the reader’s attention; as a Public Service Announcement, it sets a new standard, however, the graphic violence the characters endure can occasionally seem gratuitous.
While ANYBODY’S DAUGHTER, is a gripping read, after weathering a few stomach-churning sequences of abuse, the reader starts to feel almost as preyed upon as the victims in the novel itself.
Reviewed by Julia Lai for IndieReader.