Reporter and recovering gambling addict Hallie Ahearn discovers an unsettling reality while goofing off at a social networking website. She follows a link to a teaser clip, which shows two teenage girls acting somewhat provocatively. She suspects this clip is aimed at men willing to pay to see internet porn featuring underage girls. Intrigued, Hallie poses online as a teenage girl, trying to learn more about this group. She finds out about men who will give girls free webcams to entice girls into this ring.

Can such a thing really be happening in Newport, Rhode Island? After Hallie discovers that some of the girls are local, she tries to meet them in person. As she comes closer and closer to the ringleader, one girl disappears and another one dies. All the while Hallie must convince her editors that this is a story worth printing, worth telling.

Was the death of a teenaged girl really an accidental drug overdose? Or was it a clever murder? What happened to Lexie, the girl who disappeared? Is she dead too or is she in danger? Will Hallie's editors kill the story before she can find the truth? And will her boyfriend, assistant attorney general Mark Cavanaugh, walk away from Hallie after she breaks her promise to not cover big local crime stories? Can Hallie find the answers before a killer comes after her too?

Despite TEASER being the third book in a series, I had no problem following the characters and their pasts. Hallie's dogged determination to pursue this story has far greater consequences than she could have imagined. Hallie undergoes a definite change by the end of the book. Ms. Brogan has penned a spellbinding investigative journalism story that will keep readers on the edge of their seats. Fans of this genre won't be disappointed.

Book Summary

Hallie Ahern, a Providence, Rhode Island, reporter and recovering gambling addict, is trawling online chat rooms in search of a story for her newspaper’s Web site when an anonymous source sends her a short video clip, a teaser. Featuring two girls striking provocative poses, the clip promises more to come. As Hallie follows up on the lead, staking out tech shops and high school hangouts in search of the girls in the clip, she discovers that men are buying the girls webcams and lavishing them with gifts to make sure they use them. But those gifts are only a taste of the perils to come.

The paper’s new owners love the idea of an exposé that warns parents of the dangers of the Internet, but when girls start dying, and when Hallie’s boyfriend—a prosecutor with the Attorney General’s office—ends up on another side of the story altogether, the situation goes from dark to lethal.

As Hallie is caught between her responsibilities as a reporter and as a concerned citizen, her investigation leads her deep into a far-reaching conspiracy in Teaser, Jan Brogan’s latest gripping mystery.