Here is my one-word review of THE STOLEN ONES: Whoa. Actually, it’s the word that I repeated several times during the course of reading it. Owen Laukkanen, within the space of a few novels --- four, with the publication of his latest --- is rapidly becoming the king of the one-night reads, and he doubles down on that proposition with this fourth book in the Stevens and Windermere series. More on that in a moment.

THE STOLEN ONES begins with a scenario out of a nightmare. An off-duty deputy sheriff makes a traffic check on a suspicious truck in the middle of a diner parking lot that, in turn, is in the middle of Cass County, Minnesota. Within the space of a few moments, the truck is gone, the officer is dead, and a young, hysterical woman who speaks almost no English is standing over him with his service revolver in her hand. She, of course, has nothing to do with it --- Laukkanen keeps the reader a step or three ahead of everyone --- but the lady, a Rumanian teenager named Irina, is the number-one suspect in the officer’s murder for about half a minute. That is the case until Kirk Stevens of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) arrives on the scene, his family vacation freshly interrupted. His hunch is confirmed in due course through the work of Carla Windermere, with whom Stevens has partnered on three previous occasions.

"THE STOLEN ONES will make you a believer if you have never read one of the Stevens and Windermere novels. You will also wonder why Owen Laukkanen is not a household name in the constellation of thriller authors."

What the reader knows that neither Stevens nor Windermere does is that Irina is just one of a group of young women who are being transported across the country against their will, part of the ocean of human trafficking that feeds the sex slave industry. What makes things even worse is that Irina’s younger sister, Catalina, is still being held captive on the truck. Irina was lured into her dire straits with the promise of coming to the United States to become a movie star. Naturally, Catalina decided to sneak off with Irina at the last minute with disastrous results. Neither of them speaks English or has any idea of where they are, and now they are separated.

Stevens and Windermere are standing in the middle of a highway in Minnesota without a clue. Actually, they get a clue and work that to death before getting another. Then they cross the country a couple of times, making a painstaking effort to find out what’s going on and to shut down the evil monsters behind it. It’s good old-fashioned police investigative work that saves the day, combined with what we accurately could call spunk and spirit. Maybe, just maybe, the vile scum who engages in this type of reprehensible criminal activity has grabbed the wrong victims, who, as it develops, aren’t quite ready to be victims at all.

THE STOLEN ONES will make you a believer if you have never read one of the Stevens and Windermere novels. You will also wonder why Owen Laukkanen is not a household name in the constellation of thriller authors. Read this one (and his backlist) and spread the word. These books are amazing.