Thursday, March 29, 2018

A Map of the Dark ~ Karen Ellis review [@KatiaLief @mulhollandbooks]

A Map of the Dark (The Searchers #1)
Mullholand Books
January 02, 2018
292 pages
add to Goodreads/buy from Book Depository/or Amazon


A girl, missing
A woman, searching
A killer, planning...

FBI Agent Elsa Myers finds missing people.
She knows how it feels to be lost...

Though her father lies dying in a hospital north of New York City, Elsa cannot refuse a call for help. A teenage girl has gone missing from Forest Hills, Queens, and during the critical first hours of the case, a series of false leads hides the fact that she did not go willingly.

With each passing hour, as the hunt for Ruby deepens into a search for a man who may have been killing for years, the case starts to get underneath Elsa's skin. Everything she has buried - her fraught relationship with her sister and niece, her self-destructive past, her mother's death - threatens to resurface, with devastating consequences.

In order to save the missing girl, she may have to lose herself...and return to the darkness she's been hiding from for years.
It was great, when preparing this review, to find out that A Map of the Dark was the first in a series. Though this book concluded very well and did wrap up the story, I had hoped we would see more of at least some of the characters. Now, I am looking forward to the second book, Last Night.

Author Karen Ellis, a pseudonym of Katia Lief, gave readers thrilling read centered around a missing teen and an FBI agent with her own reasons for being so dedicated to finding the missing girl. I liked that Elsa's past played a roe in her joining law enforcement, but also in why she is so good at finding missing children. And that it was not the reason you, at first, believe.

Readers will see certain developments coming before (some of) the characters, but they seem to only be those that we are meant to anticipate, the ones that increase the tension. The story is full of a lot of surprises and anxiety, as well.

The more you know about the characters, the more you both want to know about them and the more you want them to be safe. I really loved that this was a great, thrilling mystery with a crime to be solved and someone(s) to be rescued but also gave us characters we could be invested in, care about and root for.

The crime aspect of this story and the investigation were well done and seemed realistic and I am hoping we will get to see more development of the characters and their relationships in the books to come. I highly recommend this first book in The Searchers series.




No comments:

Post a Comment

Book Trailer Friday [@RandomHouse @TransworldBooks]

Beth Dorey-Stein's From the Corner of the Oval  - a tale of being the White House stenographer during the Obama administration will be ...