Allison hasn’t seen her foster family in thirteen years when she receives a letter from Roland, her foster brother, informing her that her foster father is dying. She has some lingering questions about one of her last nights in the house with her family, so she rushes to her father’s bedside to pay respects and to find some answers. Once she is there, it is as if she has never left. Things fall into a comfortable rhythm. Her sister and two brothers feel exactly like the family she had way back when, and it feels great to be back with the father that she has missed for so long. But as she begins to try to put pieces together, she realizes that her family has some big secrets…and they’ve been lying to her and to one another. So what really happened thirteen years ago?

OKAY. First of all, I really liked The Lucky Ones by Tiffany Reisz. I fully expected to like it, to be honest. Even though I completely blushed my way through the Original Sinners Series, I absolutely loved it. The main reason is that Ms. Reisz writes the hell out of her characters. They’re all so fully developed and either completely likable or completely unlikable, so her stories have always felt so BIG to me. The same applies here. This family is a little bit whacked out, but I didn’t realize it until I got to know these characters. At first, they seemed just a little bit strange, but they got stranger and stranger as the story went on. The way they behaved was…I’m honestly not sure if it is okay or not. (Don’t @ me.)

The morally grey areas here in this story made it extra fun for me. As Allison unlocks the mystery surrounding that awful night thirteen years ago, she finds out some pretty creepy things. This is where I feel like Mr. Reisz wound the “risks vs. benefits” part of her story in – some of the behavior I read about was just awful. Or was it? I mean, it made things better for some people…but was it right? This really drove me to turn the pages and find out more. But before that even happened…

…this family is just bizarre. I love the characters – they’re funny and warm and sweet and strange. I could picture them easily in my head and their dialogue was something that I feel like I could imagine as I was reading. But they act as only Ms. Reisz’s characters could act. She is so great at creating out-of-the-box characters.

The setting was fun: a house that resembled a dragon, sitting on the shore in Oregon. The book had a fairly foggy, misty, dark tone and was just a fun, fun story to read. I’ve seen other readers say that the character at the beginning of the book (Cooper McQueen) is from another of Ms. Reisz’s mystery stories – coincidentally, one that I haven’t read yet. So now I’m completely curious about him. He wasn’t a major character here, but he showed up enough that I want to know more. Well played, Ms. Reisz.

I recommend The Lucky Ones by Tiffany Reisz to the diehard fans of this author and to readers of mystery and romantic suspense. I also recommend this one to readers that enjoy a little bit of a moral dilemma in their stories. I admittedly didn’t know how this one would turn out until the very end.