3.5-STAR REVIEW: THE LOST CHILD by Thomas Grant Bruso

Publication Date: September 26, 2023

Newspaper reporter Luke Sorenson has recently moved to a new town in upstate New York. Despite the change in scenery, Luke cannot run away from a brutal, harrowing past driven by the death of his only child, Emily.

Soon, Luke is propelled into a dangerous case of child abduction, an eerie reminder of losing his daughter. An eight-year-old boy named Daniel Hadley is kidnapped from his own bedroom and it is Luke, battling his own demons, who is assigned the story of the year.

As pieces of Luke’s mysterious, violent past are revealed, so are the sinister secrets to his daughter’s demise, sending Luke into a tailspin of heavy drinking and self-torment.

The search for Daniel is on, but it may be too late for everyone involved.

A newspaper reporter with a hidden past finds himself experiencing horrifying delusions related to his dead daughter.

Author Thomas Grant Bruso creates a highly complicated main character in Luke Sorenson. While the first part of The Lost Child opens with Luke and his vivid hallucinations, the primary focus is on the search for a missing boy.

While the author excels at providing plenty of descriptive language to create a backdrop for the story, there’s some confusion about exactly what the story is supposed to be about. Luke’s psychological meltdown and subsequent spiral between drunk and hungover takes readers in one direction. When Danny goes missing, and Luke is assigned to cover the story, the expectation is the two-story arcs will come together.

Structurally, the concepts are solid, but need more work to smoothly integrate. Although the book is labeled as bisexual fiction, the main character’s sexual proclivities are not highly detailed.

The Lost Child features a dual storyline depicting an abducted boy and a troubled reporter assigned to the story.

Thomas Grant Bruso knew he wanted to be a writer at an early age. He has been a voracious reader of genre fiction since childhood.

His literary inspirations are Ray Bradbury, Dean Koontz, Stephen King, Jim Grimsley, Karin Fossum, and Joyce Carol Oates.

Bruso loves animals, reading books, and writing fiction, and prefers Sudoku to crossword puzzles.

In another life, he was a freelance writer and wrote for magazines and newspapers. In college, he won the Hermon H. Doh Sonnet Competition. Now, he writes and publishes fiction and reviews books for his hometown newspaper, The Press-Republican.

He lives in upstate New York.

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