Find Her by Lisa Gardner

After reading my two nonfiction books for the month of February, I turned my attention back to that infamous stack under my nightstand. The pile of novels that my mother has loaned to me has been steadily shrinking under my efforts since the beginning of the year. Find Her, a crime thriller by Lisa Gardner, is my second-to-last one. I read this while I was away to run the Disney Princess Half Marathon last month. While I was resting up for the big event, I sped through this novel in a little over a day. Happily, it ended up being the perfect book to take on a trip. Full of suspense and well crafted twists and turns, Find Her is a truly enjoyable guilty pleasure read.

To tell too much of the plot would definitely spoil the story, so my summary will be brief. The plot centers around Flora Dane, a young woman in recovery from being abducted and assaulted when she was a college student. She was held prisoner for 472 days before managing to escape her captor, and the experience has left her with deep emotional scars. She's become an expert on criminal behavior, learned survival skills, and become a vigilante. Unable to return to a normal life, she works to find other missing girls who haven't made it home yet. While working on the case of a local abducted girl, Flora disappears herself, and Boston detective D.D. Warren must step in to try and untangle what happened and bring her home.

The narration shifts between characters and different time periods throughout the novel, with some chapters narrated by Flora in the present time, some narrated by D.D. in the present, and some flashing back to the 472 days of Flora's original abduction. Information is revealed at a deliciously suspenseful rate, with enough little pieces dropped consistently to keep readers hooked into the story. All through the reading you can tell that the story is building up to something major, and when the twists finally come, they don't disappoint.

Aside from excellent plotting, the characters in Find Her are well-drawn. Flora is quite compelling in her pain and confusion. She is a women irrevocably damaged by her experiences and struggling to relate to her family and develop a sense of normalcy. Her emotions feel genuine. The other characters in the story mostly function as background players to Flora's story, but they are similarly interesting to read. D.D. Warren is your typical tough, somewhat unpolished detective. Samuel Keynes, Flora's victim's advocate, is a quiet, intelligent, and steady force that you end up wanting to know more about. Jacob X, Flora's original abductor, is sickening in his compulsions and behavior. Everyone was interesting to read about and contributed to the overall engaging nature of the story.

I was truly surprised by how much I enjoyed this novel. Find Her is the perfect read for fans of books like Gone Girl and Girl on a Train. This is one of those novels that's perfect for when you don't feel like picking up something dense and just want to fall into a great story that you can polish off in a few days. This novel is apparently the eighth in a series featuring Detective D.D. Warren, but it most definitely can be read as a standalone. I had no idea it was a series when I started reading it and didn't feel like I was missing anything as I moved through it. I might actually end up picking up some of the others in this collection one day, as I was definitely a fan of this one.

This isn't the sort of book I would have picked up on my own, but I'm glad that my mom saw fit to loan it to me. I must say, I approached her stack of books with more than a little bit of dread owing to how we are such different readers, but I have liked essentially everything she's chosen.This story is no exception.  


Challenge Tally:
Clear the Shelves 2018: 5 books donated

Total Books Read in 2018: 11