Note: Thank you to NetGalley, Bookouture, and author Robert Gold for the advanced reader copy of this book. This review will also be posted on NetGalley. What follows is my unbiased review of the book.

This is the third in a series centered around the character of Ben Harper. Ben is a journalist in Haddley, a neighborhood in London, who is now working for an online site. His boss and close friend, Madeline Wilson, invited Ben and Madeline’s father, Sam, to celebrate her birthday at a favorite restaurant. Ben sees Madeline leave the restaurant and get into her car, and that’s the last he sees of her.

There’s a lot going on in Ten Seconds. Although the focus is on Madeline’s disappearance, there are other stories at play that are linked back to the two previous books. Robert Gold does a decent job recounting some events, but the problem is that some of the tangents seem unnecessary. They are conclusions of other stories that have no real bearing on events here, and there is plenty going on without it. If you’ve read the other books and want to keep up with the characters and stories, I can understand. Coming from a place of not having read those books, it’s just a distraction.

Being a publisher, Madeline has made enemies. Ben receives a message demanding two million pounds, and no police involvement, which puts him in an awkward position. Ben and Sam soon link her disappearance and the mysterious message to a murder twelve years earlier, which Madeline used her power as a journalist to push the police to solve. Ben’s sort of girlfriend is Dani Cash, an investigator with the Haddley Police Department. He and Sam investigate on their own, while Dani and the rest of the Haddley Police chase after a burglar who has been targeting women alone in their homes, along with several other crimes.

The story is told from various perspectives, including flashbacks to the youth of one of the characters. I knew who it was fairly early on, and guessed some of what was going to happen. It gives a lot of background that doesn’t really come together until the end of the book. The chapters don’t indicate whether it’s a first-person point of view or a third-person, so at times I found the beginning of a new chapter confusing until I read a page or so.

The mystery was good, with a lot of twists and turns that I didn’t always see coming. I had a hard time getting into the story due to the tangents, but once it grabbed me, I couldn’t put it down. It’s more the town of Haddley that’s the focus here, between the police department, the celebrity chef and his restaurant, the break-ins, the grade school, and the murder on the nearby bridge. There are many things happening that do tie together at the end. I liked the characters, and might have enjoyed this book more had I read the first two in the series before this one. Ben seems to want the relationship with Dani but doesn’t want to do the work it requires. His demand seems to be that she has to adjust her being a police officer to suit his life as an investigative reporter. I don’t know what’s gone on before with them, it’s just how it feels here.

I liked Ten Seconds, but it wasn’t an easy read, largely due to the structure and ongoing stories from the previous books in the series. I could follow it, but it was hard to know what was important to the story in this book versus what had happened in the past. I rounded the 3 1/2 star rating up to 4 stars since I was feeling generous.