"When the FBI can' t help, an unassuming banker takes matters into his own hands to bring his son home Wade, a respected banker in La Jolla, CA, and his estranged wife, Fiona, make the unbearable decision to send their teenage son, Myles, away to an expensive treatment center after a streak of harmful behavior. After a year of treatment, Myles comes home, seemingly rehabilitated. But soon, he sneaks off to Tijuana to buy drugs— and is kidnapped. When the ransom call comes, Fiona is frantic and accepts help from Andre, the Quebecois whose charity Fiona runs. Wade is wary of Andre' s reputation and the bank he owns but seeing no other way to secure a kidnap negotiator or the ransom, he swallows his doubts to get his son home. In order to get the ransom money, Wade makes a deal with Andre— he'll work for Andre' s bank in exchange for the cash. But as Wade races to rescue Myles before his kidnappers lose their patience, he realizes he' s wrapped up in more crime than just a kidnapping— he' s now indebted to a cartel.".
Will he be able to save Myles, will he be able not to be indebted to the cartel? Will have to read the story to find out.
Suspenseful, thrilling, emotional, ,great storyline, great characters. I give this story 4 stars.
Thanks to netgalley, oceanview publishing for an opportunity to leave an honest review.
Published Aug 15th, 2023

This is the first book I've read by this author & I will be looking out for more books! This story was confronting but good! I had trouble putting it down!

I finally got a chance to read Carl Vonderau's novel. Saving Myles was a slow burn for me. I had a hard time staying invested in the story to begin with but the action ramped up about half way through the book making it hard to put down. A solid 3 star novel if you just stick with it.

Thank you Netgalley for this arc

Whoa this was fast paced and crazy, in a good way! I had a blast reading this and would love to read more from this author.

This is the story of parents Wade and Fiona and what they will do to save their only child Myles. Myles has been battling with addiction. It’s caused so much tension in the relationship between Wade & Fiona that they have separated. They agree to send Myles to a treatment facility and think Myles is recovering. When Myles gets out he decides to celebrate with a trip to Tijuana with a friend from the rehab facility. While in Tijuana he gets kidnapped and the drug cartel that took him wants money. His parents are at a loss of what to do because they have spent all their money sending Myles to rehab. Is this just a kidnapping for money or is there more to the story? I found the story interesting and it started out strong, but the second half of the book was slower and the ending was a little too fairy tale for me. Overall, a decent book. Thank you to Net Galley for the Arc.

Thanks to Netgalley and Oceanview Publishing for providing this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Wade and Fiona's high school age son, Miles, is using drugs and causing an immense amount of trouble in the household so they spend all of their money to get him into a rehab in Utah. When he returns home to the San Diego area after a year in rehab, he promptly follows a new girlfriend to Tijuana, where he gets kidnapped during a drug deal. Wade and Fiona are out of money to pay the ransom and turn to her boss, Andre, who runs a non-profit, but they get in way over their heads and end up in a total mess with the cartel.

This book made me happy I that I am childless. Miles was a fool to start and it was sad to see his parents struggle with his nonsense. I thought this was pretty fast paced to start, with the emotional middle of the night abduction to the rehab and the kidnapping not long after. But, once Wade and Fiona were indebted to Andre things slowed down and unfortunately I lost interest to some extent. I saw enough money laundering over 4 seasons of Ozark and this didn't really hold my interest. I thought the occasional Tijuana setting was interesting, as it is a place I have not been to, despite my great love of Mexico, but it wasn't enough to really keep me engaged. I would consider reading more from this author depending on the synopsis and reviews.

Unfortunately I found this book to be too cliche-ridden for me to tolerate. I quit after reading less than 100 pages.

I feel bad but this was a DNF for me. I just could not get into it. I tried and tried but it just didn't catch me. Maybe I will try again another time and it will respark my interest as it wasn't bad at all. I was surprised I wasn't feeling it. Maybe it was the writing style. Its hard to explain why as the concept of the book was good and usually would be my go to thing. I think the beginning caught me but then the story sort of got slower and slower and lost my interest as the content wasn't about what I thought the book was about.

In Carl Vonderau's Saving Myles, you think that once Wade and his estranged wife Fiona rescue their son from Mexican kidnappers, that's the end of the story. But it's only just the beginning.

Because of whom Wade and Fiona choose to trust, their son's ransom is paid but with a contingency. Now the two find themselves working for a Mexican cartel, and there's no way out - unless they want to get killed.

Going back and forth between San Diego and Tijuana, the novel keeps you guessing about who the family can trust and what they are willing to do to save themselves.

In the beginning, I thought this was going to be a story about a rebellious teenager selling drugs and the difficulties his parents have keeping him straight after rehab. But that all happened in the very first chapters, and then I went, "Well, now what?" Now what, indeed.

Vonderau used his past experience as a banker and anti-money laundering specialist to write this intense crime fiction novel.

Saving Myles is published by Oceanview Publishing. It's available to purchase now. I received a free e-ARC.

A huge thank you to Net Galley, the publisher, and Carl Vonderau for the opportunity to review an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review!!

please look up trigger warnings before reading, as the main character struggles with addiction.

Saving Myles was a great read and it tugged right on my heart strings for personal reasons.

The book follows Fiona and Wade and their son Myles who was developed a serious drug problem and is actively struggling with addiction and they decided to admit him to rehab in another state, Once he returns, he attempts to relapse and while trying to buy drugs is kidnapped into the Mexican drug cartel.

you then accompany on the wild ride of trying to reunite Myles with his family again.

Fast-paced and heart wrenching, this will for sure keep you at the edge of your seat!

This was really entertaining and gripping for the first 50% of the book. I enjoyed the first half a bit more than the second half of the book simply because I felt like the book drug on way too long and could have been a bit shorter. The first half of this book I FLEW through and absolutely could not put down. The character growth for each of our primary characters (especially Myles) was great. The second half I found it a little harder to get through and just wanting to get to the conclusion. Overall this was a solid, enjoyable read.

Wade and Fiona have always struggled with their son, Myles. They send him away for a year of treatment to rehabilitate him and get him away from bad influences. But Myles falls into bad habits upon his return. His parents have split up due to guilt. While Myles is in Tijuana, he is kidnapped. His parents are strapped for money having used it for his rehabilitation. Andre’, who was once kidnapped, offers to help them get Myles back, but the deal is steep with illegal crime. Will they get Myles back in one piece? There is a very high price to pay and many strings attached.

A nightmarish tale of a kidnapping that draws a family into the world of the cartels, blackmail, money laundering, and murder. At the start of the story, Wade and Fiona make the tough decision to send their teenage son Myles off to rehab after discovering his hidden Oxy stash. Things seem better after he gets home, but it doesn't take long before Myles crosses the border into Tijuana to make a drug deal, and ends up kidnapped. In order to make the ransom, Wade and Fiona make a deal with Fiona's boss, Andre. This deal isn't done in good faith however, and it throws this family right into the viper's nest. Andre is connected to a large Mexican cartel, and Wade and his family are now involved. Can they escape unscathed?

This is a like a real life horror story. Wade and Fiona just want to do what's best for their son, but their decision to send him off to a prisonlike rehab facility just pushes him even further away. It only takes one wrong choice to destroy a family. The story is told from three different perspectives: Wade, Fiona, and Myles. Each character is fully developed and adds an interesting layer to the story. As the truth slowly unfolds, you see the full extent of the horror in which this family finds itself. Very tense and twisty.

I received a complimentary copy of this book. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.

So, I gvie this book a solid 3 stars. It wasn't a terrible book but it wasn't a great book either. It kept me interested and I finished it but I just left feeling, meh.

This is an interesting story, albeit rather sad. What do you do when your teenage son goes off the rails, staying out all hours, getting drunk and experimenting with drugs? Myles parents decide to send him away to a treatment centre far away in Utah (they live in San Diego), where he stays for a year, at great cost, they take all the loans possible and end up with huge debts.

When Myles first comes home he seems to be cured, but he soon gets back into his old ways. He and his girlfriend go into Tijuana to buy drugs, and he falls into a trap, and gets kidnapped. The kidnappers demand a huge ransom, impossible for his parents to repay. They receive a lot of help from Myles’ mother’s boss, for which they are initially grateful, until they realise that the help comes at huge cost. Myles’ father has to leave a job he loves and is very good at, to do a similar job on the illegal side of the line, and his wife has signed papers which would make her guilty of fraud if the charity she works for were audited.

They start working with a team of law enforcers - FBI, Drug Enforcement Agency, Border Control, etc, although it is very frustrating for all of them. They are planning to catch the most senior members of a Mexican crime syndicate, however there are huge risks involved, the Mexicans have no humour, they only get even, no matter how long it takes.

The plans work, but that doesn’t really mean the end of the family problems, the ending is layered with pessimism. But it is an interesting story, you learn a lot about how law enforcement works in the USA, and about the many evil tentacles the Mexican Mafia have involvement in. It was never going to be an optimistic ending.

Unfortunately this book wasn't for me, it went over my head a few times. I was also confused by all the different names and characters, which made the story difficult to follow. Since there are a lot of positive reviews, I think it's up to me and not the book's fault.
However, the last part was very exciting for me because I still wanted to know how everything turned out.

I did not finish this one, it was not for me, I couldn't relate to the characters, and just did not care for the story.

Saving Myles by Carl Vonderau is an important book about a story that is happening too frequently. The first part of the book is about 16 year-old Myles Bosworth’s incorrigible behavior, including his significant use of alcohol and other illegal substances. Wade and Fiona Bosworth, Myles’ parents, had already spent a lot of money in an attempt to hook him into a rehabilitation program, and he had resisted all attempts at providing him with such care. After finding his stash of OxyContin, the Bosworth’s made the heartbreaking decision to send their son to a wilderness-type camp in Utah, and he was then kidnapped in the middle of the night by two employees from Hidden Road Academy.

I should interject that in real life as a psychiatrist/psychoanalyst, I’ve been involved in and provided treatment for people at various stages in their efforts to deal with substance abuse. Regarding substance abusers who are still under the influence of their substances of choice, its nearly impossible to form a favorable therapeutic relationship. Teenagers are often even more difficult. Also, there are few teenage one-substance addictions. Rather, its normal to see people with polysubstance addictions. Whether it has been my own patients or the children of my friends or the children of my patients, this is a dangerous scenario and one that often has a bad outcome. On one hand, I’ve known too many people who have died from their disease, but on the other hand, I’ve have known some people as young as 15 years old, who have found their way to long-term clean and sober lives and very successful lives. However, I’ve also seen more of heartbreaking treatment resistance. There are some legitimate and helpful programs in the United States, but there are also scam operations who are expert at draining people of their savings. Furthermore, considering the emotional dynamics of the sobriety process, it’s often very difficult to tell the good programs from the bad ones. Considering that I live in Northern San Diego County, the substance troubles sometimes do include unwise trips into Mexico where things can get even more out of control.

Myles lasted in the program for some seven to nine months before he was sent back home, and so begins the second part of this drama. He had learned how to say all the right things to his parents, but his statements were not sincere. Within days of his release from the Hidden Road Academy, he was back in Tijuana where he was drinking alcohol and buying and using drugs. He also met and fell in love with the daughter of big figure in a crime cartel. The cartel is quite sophisticated, kidnapped him, and then used Myles addiction problems as a way to entrap his parents into various cartel activities. U.S. Federal forces become engaged in this story. A central theme has to do whether it’s reasonable for the parents, who are desperate to save their son who has repeatedly lied to them about his substance abuse, to believe anything that he says to them.

So the story is about a well-meaning U.S. family trying to understand how to deal with the Mexican mobsters. Who can they trust? Danger and death are in the air. This feels like real life stuff, and the book gets my strong recommendation.

This plot takes you through the twists and turns of a troubled teen, Myles, and what his parents would do to keep him safe. As the choices he makes cause things to spiral out of control and end up with the teen being kidnapped with a ransom his parents cannot afford to pay. The book is good and fast paced. I would recommend the book and the author.

Saving Myles by Carl Vonderau the first time reading a new author you don't know what to expect. I found this to be an entertaining read, and it kept me turning the pages until the end. The author had the ability to bring the emotions to life when thinking how we would respond in the same situation. I would recommend this book to others.

I received an ARC from NetGalley and Oceanview Publishing, I am leaving my review voluntarily.