“Her name’s Ruby Haverstock. She’s seventeen, almost eighteen, and her parents haven’t heard from her since Friday night. She went to her job at a local café, left work on time, and that was that.”
As the excerpt says this looks as an ordinary missing girl case for this new series featuring a female lead character, an FBI agent, Elsa Myers, but there are other complexities, other darkness indoors waiting to lurk its head out, other truths that wait and you feel the intensity at times of something coming and this keeps you reeled in and immersed in the tale. The fragility of this agent and her past brought before the reader in unfolding events and a series of flashbacks to her terrible mother daughter relationship. She is captive of the dark past within, a release somehow wanting, and with an ailing father with cancer needing attention she needs to focus on the discovery of the missing girl, battling with past and present some resilience to move in right direction in a map of discovery sought, a map of dark things may just come to fruition. Time is of essence, a sense of things slipping away from her, her own web of permeant reminders must be subdued, as the the chapters that mark the days mount, chances of the missing being alive shorten.
This is a psychological tale that has you intertwined in the discovery of Elsa’s troubled past and her dealing and coming to terms with that, with her competent outer but fragile inner self and then also the safety of the missing.
There are maybe one or two things in this story that do not feel plausible in reality.
The writing, easy flowing, visceral, and the psychology mystery has you reading on in some compelling and accessible thrill.

A new series, the introduction of a new character, Elsa, an FBI agent who had a very difficult and abusive past, and is dealing with an impending sorrow in the present. Young women are going missing, and it is up to Elsa, and the young policemen who asked for her assistance, to find them.

So far, so good, Elsa is an interesting character, Lex her police counterpoint on this, grows on one and cements the deal by books end. For me though, the back story of Elsa quite overtook the case of the missing. It was an intriguing back story but nonetheless definitely overshadowed everything else going on, very lopsided. The case itself had a plot point that was so predictable one could see it coming from s mile away, cliche I know. What happens next in the case I just couldn't quite swallow as believable. There is also one coincidence of a personal nature that felt to me, contrived. So a mixed read, but an intriguing enough of a character that it may call me back to read book two, which I am suspecting will have less of the past and more of a case.

ARC from Netgalley.

A solid addition to the genre with an likeable cast of characters. At times the amount of backstory seems to compete with the main plot, but it's all fast-paced enough to not be an issue, and further installments of the series will have more room to breathe and move forward because of it. Ellis is sure to hook many fans with this one.

Special Agent Elsa Myers is trying to come to grips with the pending death of her father and facing several old bad memories. At the same time, she can't resist it when her supervisor calls her in for a case of a missing teenager. Ms. Ellis does a terrific job of character development including the of balancing Elsa as an emotionally scarred woman and an intuitive investigator. The story of the missing teenagers and a potential serial kidnapper provides a terrific framework to get to know Elsa as well as many other characters that hopefully are recurring in future installments of the series. The only thing that bugged me during the reading of the book the lack of dogs in the hunt. Ms. Ellis may have wanted to use the moment to highlight certain things but it seemed odd to have humans racing through a forest without the aid of the superior canine nose. Hopefully this is rectified in future stories. I'll be reading them!

I'm not a fan of police procedurals and/or series thrillers in general as I find them formulaic, predictable and going for the cheap thrill. This novel transcended all of that. The main character is complex enough to carry the reader through a number of novels and I like the development of the secondary characters who are also fleshed and unique enough to carry a reader's interest beyond a single book.

The plot itself was not extraordinary, but it didn't have to be, because the author made me feel.

Thank you, Netgalley, for the e-review copy of this novel.

Special Agent Elsa has a soft spot for 'reading' teenagers--especially in the midst of a crisis. When seventeen-year-old Ruby goes missing, she's immediately asked to work it, despite her terminally-ill father being in the hospital. She doesn't realize that this particular case will hit closer to home than she expects. While there are several holes in this story's plot, it's a fast read that will have you speed reading to see what happens to Ruby and his other victims.

This was a fast mystery that was a bit predictable. I enjoyed Special Agent Elsa Myers and I look forward to seeing more from her. You could tell that a lot of this novel was about setting her up for future books, and that is fine, glad it is out of the way.

I really enjoyed this story. it was just the right mix of everything and I look forward to reading more from the author and about the characters!

Torn between her dying father and her job as an FBI agent, Elsa Myers makes the difficult decision to leave her father’s bedside to join forces with an NYPD detective to track a missing teen. Stumbling over a series of red herrings, Elsa begins to panic, knowing that with each passing hour, her chances of locating the missing girl alive grow slimmer. This book was so good on so many level, yes the kidnapping story was incredibly tense, but the storyline about Elsa’s battle to have control over every aspect of her life, even knowing she’s fighting a losing battle, was so real and so immediate. Fantastic read, highly recommended