Gone The Next (Roy Ballard Mysteries Book 1) Kindle Edition

I really liked this book. The humor was great and the plot kept me guessing the whole time. Well worth a read.

Roy Ballard is an insurance fraud videographer / investigator in Austin, Texas. He’s funny, flippant, cynical, and carries some criminal baggage of his own. Years back, he was arrested for assault (punching his old boss out for disrespectful comments about a woman). Right at the end of his probation, he was stopped for DWI, and the policeman discovered unprescribed pills in the car. So, Ballard has a record.His usual jobs are investigating people who file fraudulent claims for workman’s compensation. Like the ones who claim a back injury but can hoist 80-pound bags of cement at Home Depot. He has sufficient work to support himself and then some.He’s tracking and watching a restaurant dishwasher who supposedly hurt his wrist when he sees something, or someone, who shouldn’t be in the home. It’s a little girl, and Ballard is convinced she’s the little who was abducted less than a week ago. The case suddenly becomes personal; Ballard’s own daughter was abducted from the back seat of his car years before.The police investigating the kidnapping write Ballard off because of his own past. He gets help from a good friend, Mia the bartender, whom he persuades to becomes a business partner in his fraud investigations. And Jessica, a server at the restaurant where the suspect works, helps, too.“Gone the Next” is the first entry in the seven Roy Ballard mysteries by Ben Rehder, and it’s a gradually gripping mystery punctuated by Ballard’s wisecracks and general cynicism.In addition to the Roy Ballard stories, Redhder has also written 13 novels in the Blanco County series, one of which, “Buck Fever,” was a finalist for the Edgar Awards of the Mystery Writers of America. He’s also written two standalone novels, “The Chicken Hanger” and “The Driving Lesson.”“Gone the Next” is a story that also provides factual background on child abductions and kidnappings. And Rehder does a great job of keeping the reader guessing about what happened to Ballard’s own child as well as the case he’s investigating.

Gone The Next (Roy Ballard Series Book One) by Ben Rehder, 286 pages, September 15 2012, Genre: Mystery/Suspense. Warning: May Contain Spoilers.Review by Leigh Holland.    Every year, about 200,000 children are abducted in America. Seventy-eight percent are abducted by the non-custodial parent. 58,000 children were abducted last year by people who were not family members. Of those, 40 percent were murdered last year. When a child goes missing, time is crucial to recovering the child safely. As a parent, I can attest that nothing in the world is more terrifying than the thought of losing your child. Jason Voorhees? No problem. Freddy Kruger? Piece of cake. Missing kid? Parents lose a tiny bit of our minds just thinking about the possibility. If you could see inside our souls at that moment, it’d look a lot like “The Scream” by Edvard Munch, a perpetual state of frozen terror.    In this first installment of the Roy Ballard series, we follow a wise-cracking insurance fraud videographer (Roy) as he sets out to prove worker’s compensation claimants aren’t injured and are defrauding the insurance companies that provide him with lucrative pay for his services. Roy is divorced. He had a daughter from that marriage named Hannah. We’ve all done the same thing at some point- turned away for a minute. But when we look back, our child is there. Roy lost Hannah in the park one day when he turned away for a minute. The nightmare still haunts him, having shaped him. One day as he does routine surveillance on a claimant, he thinks for a moment he glimpses a famous recently missing girl standing in the man’s doorway. He hesitates, he’s unsure if the child was the missing girl. He reports it to the local police who ignore it as having no real merit. Roy continues to try to work with the police as he and his newly acquired partner Mia discover more evidence. But the police don’t want to waste time or resources unless there’s enough evidence to think it’s definite. Finding no help from the cops, Roy and Mia decide to do a little surveillance and investigating of their own. A child’s life hangs in the balance. Roy is worried time is running out to find the girl.    I enjoyed Roy’s sarcastic one liners, his feelings as a defender of women and kids, and willingness to put himself at risk for others. When he does contemplate a wrong or stupid choice, he has Mia there to set him on the right path. Mia is supportive of Roy and considers him her best friend. She’s smart, good-looking, and outspoken. Roy and Mia make a good team. There was limited, appropriate cursing. I found no issues with the grammar or spelling. The plot had a couple of interesting twists. I had to keep reading to find out if they saved the little girl. Rehder does an excellent job of evoking every parent’s worst nightmare.    I really enjoyed this book. It was a page turner for me. I look forward to reading more of Ben Rehder’s series in the future. I’d recommend this to Mystery lovers who enjoy a witty, unconventional private investigator.

I quite enjoyed Gone the Next. The main characters are well developed, quirky and interesting. Roy Ballard, the protagonist, always has snappy and often surprising responses in the well-crafted dialogue. His new sidekick, Mia Madison, a hot ex-bartender, more than keeps up with his snarky remarks. I like that Roy's not just another detective or cop with all the resources available to such a person, but rather a mere insurance fraud investigator who stumbles into the middle of a missing child case.Having had his own daughter kidnapped right under his nose, he wants to do the right thing to help the police retrieve the missing girl, but they're rather slow to listen. Probably because they think he may just be trying to vindicate himself in some way for "letting" his own child get taken in the few seconds his back was turned. In the end, the head detective on the case and Roy forge a kind of grudging alliance. I foresee a tense and verbally abusive friendship growing between these two as the series rolls out. Had there been just a little more to the plot, it would have earned all 5 stars.While the plot seems just a tad thin, in my opinion, it does have some twists and turns to keep things buzzing. Maybe I just wanted more Roy Ballard/Mia Madison time. Strike that. I DO want more Roy Ballard/Mia Madison time. I look forward to the subsequent books where an ordinary, but pretty smart, Joe can be a real hero with a personality you can really dig.

Like a number of others readers, I approached this 'free' kindle offering thinking it may not be all that good if they're giving it away. But, you know what, it turned out to be a very enjoyable read.It didn't contain the most original of plot-lines but it did have a well-told story that kept me interested and entertained throughout. I soon warmed to the central character of, Roy Ballard who is a self-employed videographer. Roy mainly deals in insurance fraud - in particular, individuals who claim to have had an accident that has allegedly injured them and who are seeking a pay-out. Roy uses all the tricks in the book to see if they are telling the truth or chasing compensation under false pretences - this involves following and observing them and obtaining video evidence to prove if they are indeed as 'incapacitated' as they claim to be. During one of his assignments, he believes he sees a girl who has been abducted from his local area. As a consequence, Roy utilises his skills to 'support' the police investigation.There is some fun to be had with this crime novel. I was amused by Roy's constant one-liners - especially the ones he uses when flirting with the opposite sex. As the story progresses, Roy takes on the assistance of Mia and I particularly liked the interactions between the pair of them. This is the first in a series of Roy Ballard novels, it's a promising start and definitely makes me want to read more of them.

3.5 starsNote: There's no child abuse here, and very little child peril, thankfully.As usual with my reviews, please first read the publisher’s blurb/summary of the book. Thank you.This is a solid, entertaining-but-light crime book. Very plausible, real characters. Easy read, mostly very linear with great pacing and easy humour. Very linear main story, interleaved with a somewhat distracting back-story; chapters of Roy's own past, the abduction of his own daughter. There is some nice reparteé and joking, a few surprises. A very limited number of voices here, sadly, leaving it a bit flat.Mia is sharp and fun. It's good to see more of her as the book proceeds. I hope much more in book #2 of the series.The pacing picks up again, very nicely halfway through, with a good mystery, very plausible plot, good characters and a few good twists - plausible and fun.Instead of an Agatha-Christie-style info dump of who did what at the end, Rehder provides a nice phone call between Ballard and the detective, Ruellas. I particularly liked the clever "tie-up-the-plot" with cagey "read between the line" questions and "answers".And yes, I will read at least one more in the series now.(This is good, compared to 4 other highly-rated-but-actually-crap books I started in the last week, and especially after reading the masterpiece The Smiling Man by young Joseph Knox. Outstanding!)Notes:19.0% "... a bit pedestrian. Not too bad. Some easy humour. Likeable characters so far, but SKIPPING the chapters with the kidnapper's point of view. Ugh."March 9, 2018 –45.0% "... some nice reparteé and jokes, a few surprises, and MIA is sharp fun. A very limited number of voices here, sadly, leaving it a bit flat."March 9, 2018 –62.0% "... the pacing is good, the prose is good enough, the minor twists in the plot keep things moving. Not bad."March 9, 2018 –99.0% "... pacing picks up halfway, good mystery, very plausible plot, good characters. Very linear main story, interleaved distracting back-story chapters of Roy's own past, the abduction of his own daughter. There's no child abuse here, and very little child peril, thankfully."

Gone the Next is sad but humourous, Roy Ballard a videographer works insurance claims, but it starts with his daughter being abducted and the marriage falls apart understandably so, as his daughter was taken in his watch. His job at the moment is best described watching people that have put in an insurance claim because they can't work etc so he checks them out against fraudulent claims, and while on a stakeout he spots an approx 6yrs old little girl that was abducted or did he? is his mind playing tricks because sometimes his stakeout goes well beyond the call of duty and as he did not photograph her so he can't be certain, The little girl's mother an alcoholic has tried to dry out a few times and a husband who plays around so was poor little Tracey really abducted or taken to spite the mother. Roy also takes on a new partner female and they seem to work great together and she is quite bright at working as a detective would and is charming and witty although Roy has a lot of one-liners. The character are well defined the descriptions of the area Austin Texas good as I'm British will have to take the author's word that it's correct but bear in mind were listening/reading fiction. a story well put together praise for Ben Rehder for a great listen as he got a good narrator in Johnny Peppers.

Ben Rehder is the author of this book but, had I not know that, I would have assumed it was Harlan Coben, they have very similar styles. I liked the protagonist Roy Ballard, an insurance fraud investigator whose latest job takes an unexpected turn when he thinks he has spotted a missing child. I enjoyed Ballard's easy-breezy approach to telling the story and I felt more invested in his personal back story than the main investigation. Ballard is something of a joker but he is quick witted, decent and good at his job. Towards the end of the book I did get a little confused with the missing girl's family members and their various feuds but I kept reading as I wanted to find out more about Roy's own issues. I liked the cast of characters and I hope they appear in more of Rehder's books. I will definitely read more by this author

This is a very good book! The humour! Read it in one sitting, couldn't put it down. Roy is a videographer, that means he is an insurance chaser, checking out those who claimed for injuries in accidents which weren't that bad. He accidentally stumbles upon a missing child whilst checking out a claim. He gets sucked in because his own daughter was abducted and then his life imploded. He takes on a very likeable partner, Mia. I would love to read some more by this guy!Does anyone know how to get rid of this damn predictive text on these tablets? Mine had Roy as a pornographer, his partner was Miami and I would like to read some more by this gut. Really.