Book Review: ‘And There He Kept Her: A Novel’ By Joshua Moehling

The debut novel from author Joshua Moehling is a solid thriller, with a great new character, acting county sheriff Ben Packard. Ben moves back to his small home town of Sandy Lake, Minnesota, where he grew up and lost his older brother many years, which fractured his family. As a cop in Minneaplis, he met Marcus and they started a secret affair (relationship?) and then Marcus was killed in a shootout. Ben came back and took the job at the Sheriff’s office and became acting sheriff, when the current sheriff became sick with cancer. And now he has two teenagers missing, Jesse and his diabetic girlfriend Jenny. As Packard investigates he finds that Jesse was dealing drugs and this could be some sort of drug situation. Jenny is being held captive and will soon run out of insulin (she has a pump that lasts 3 days). It’s a race against time to find Jenny and the more he and his team investigate, the closer it gets him to where Jenny is and mysteries that go back 20 years. I really enjoyed this book and hope for more adventures with Ben Packard, where a tease of a future story is written before the novel ends.

You can pick up And There He Kept Her in stores now from Poisoned Pen Press.