by Thomas Olis (2026)
(Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.)
This book was a free Advanced Reader Copy from Library Thing. I'm encouraged (but not required) to leave reviews in exchange for the free books.
I'm reviewing it late because I recieved it late. In fact, the author sent me the first two books to read while I was waiting. I did not read those. I don't remember if I realized that this was the third book in a series of mysteries. I did NOT know that the first book was only released a year ago.
Disclosure: I released five books within an 18-month timespan, but those were all about 40 pages long and most of the material had been written long before. Pumping out three 200-page books this quickly is a lot of work. I did notice quite a few typos, but this is an ARC not a final copy, so I can't ding the author for that unless it's particularly grievous.
I left the following review on the Library Thing website:
The Case of the Grounded Ferry (by Thomas Olis) starts off great with two friends on the beach when a ferry loses control and runs aground. The girls recognize someone on the ferry, who then tries to hide, and someone jumps off the ship and runs off the beach.
The girls, their friends, and their families get caught up in a bigger puzzle figuring out how all the pieces fit together while watching out for strangers out to do them harm.
Unfortunately for me, the mystery didn't really pull me in, and the ending felt a bit cut off. I never really got the feel for most of the characters. There were a lot of them, but other than a name (usually just a first name, even with the parents), there wasn't much to distinguish them.
I will say that the names bothered me. Everyone was a first name, except for the occasional "Mon" or "Dad". The adults are also referred to by their first names, and there are a lot of them, too. Keeping them straight and whose parents were whose might've worked better with a few last names, instead of "Mr. Jenny's Father". (Seriously.) In fact, Paul (or it might've been Pete) tells Terrence to call him anything but "sir", so he calls him by whatever name someone else called him by. The last name Stourhm, or something like that, appeared a few times in the last part of the book (once where Jenny gets called her full name by her father).
The only two kids I could keep straight were Terrence, the boy with red hair who was in the middle of everything, and Emmett, Jenny's younger brother who gets kidnapped at one point. The rest of them? I couldn't picture them at all -- maybe whatever teens and preteens I saw on some show on TV at some point. Imagine young actresses playing the parts.
The people (adults and children) behave irrationally. The police don't seem to have too much of a problem with this. (They also don't seem to use last names of the people they're talking to.) And the more I think about it, the less sense the book makes to me.
**** SPOILERS ***
And in the end, it just ends. They follow Terrence who's being kidnapped. Luckily, one of the dads works for the FBI (or was it the CIA?) and has a badge. They rescue Terrence before he's pulled onto a ship that flies a flag other than the US. The cops will not interfere, even if there might be other kids on that boat. (This make sense, but ...) And that's basically it. Sometimes, that happens.
And that's the way the story ends. Sometimes that happens. Kids get shanghaied and disappear. That happens. Less than a happy ending, and less than a satisfying one.
(End Spoilers
Oddly enough, I have nothing electronic to read at the moment. I'm waiting for books to become available, and I'm not ready to start another one of these weird sci-fi books I won. Dumb as it sounds, since Olis sent me three books, and since there's an entry on my "Reading Goals" for two book by the same author, I'll at least read the first one to see if the series got off to a decent start at least.
If you stumbled across my page via the Internet, please check out my short book series, Burke Lore Briefs. A fantastical foursome of flash fiction and short stories.
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