Thanks netgalley for another Karen Ellis book.. Enjoyed Elsa as a character, She is vulnerable and tough at the same time. Her life is in turmoil, yet she is finally able to share a small part of her life with Lex.

I really enjoyed reading "A Map of the Dark" by Karen Ellis. The author did a great job of making the main character, Elsa, draw the reader in. There was so much suspense in this book, with the missing girls, and Elsa's background also. I am reading another book by her right now.

I had read Last Night by Karen Ellis and was not enamored. So I was a little hesitant to read A Map of the Dark. Boy, I wish I had read this book prior to the other. What I missed in background in Last Night was explained in A Map of the Dark. It is best to read these in order.

A Map of the Dark kept my attention throughout. While it was not the best written FBI/Police/Detective book, it does hold one's attention. It will be a good summer by the pool book.

Thank you NetGalley for an advanced copy and sorry for the delayed review.

Dark, gripping mystery with great characters! *Trigger warnings: child neglect, abuse, and self-harm.

This book did a better job than most crime stories making the detectives into “real” people. A lot focused on Elsa’s past and I appreciated getting the insight into how her personality developed. At the surface, she seems introverted and callous. I realized there were a multitude of events from her childhood that effected her career and entire adult life.

Overall this was a fantastic, well-written mystery and I highly recommend it! I’m also excited to read the next in the series! Many thanks to NetGalley and publishers for the free book in exchange for my honest review.

This was a first book for me from this author but it won't be the last I really liked this book it held my interest from the beginning ....Can't wait to read more from Karen Ellis.

A decent thriller as FBI agent Elsa is tasked with finding a missing teenager while dealing many family issues in the background. I think I was hoping that there would be more of a plot line with the missing girl, but the story really delves into the backstory of Elsa's family and how it shaped her character. While her backstory is intriguing, I did pretty much know what was going to be revealed in the end, so that also took away a bit from the plot line I was thinking would have been more prevalent. But a good story and one that makes an interesting read

I didn’t know what I was in for when I started this story, but I was pleasantly kept on the edge of my seat.

Though it was an excellently written and intriguing storyline, I just couldn’t connect with Elsa.

I’m going to try the next book and hope I can connect better.

Please give this book a chance because if I could have connected, it would have been 5 stars.

Title: A Map OF The Dark

series: The Searchers #1

Author: Karen Ellis

Genre: Thriller

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.



My thoughts

Rating: 2

Would I recommend it?no

Will I read anything else by this author? no

It was slow and boring and that times I just wanted to DNF it, but I didn't I was hopping that it would get better but it didn't , the more I read the more I didn't care for the characters at all or what was happening , with that said I want to thank Netgalley for letting me read it and review it exchange for my honest opinion .

This was absolutely phenomenal. It's a deeply moving story about a very good FBI agent named Elsa. She is the lead expert on finding kids - ones that go missing with no leads, no information and no explanation. She gets into the mind of the kids, the stalker and she finds them. But she's haunted. Being present for so many parents pain of having their children missing is draining for her.

She is also losing her father. She's struggling to find time to sit with him while he enters hospice care and being assigned a new case. Elsa and her sister, Tara, tag team spending time with him while Elsa also rushes off to chase the leads of the case. All the while, Elsa spends time remembering and struggling with her childhood.

This story absolutely sucked me in. The characters were believable and interesting. Even though a lot of the things held until the end weren't surprising, I did like the path through the story to get to the reveals. The crime was well done and well paced and kept me wondering how it would all work out. I liked getting to know the detectives, the agents and the families as Elsa works the case. I was absolutely sucked in and look forward to following this author and reading more of their work!

Having read the book A Map in the Dark, I was pleased to discover that it is the first in a planned new series by the author. The reader is taken on a journey which combines an introduction to Elsa who is an FBI agent with a search for missing girls and an insight into Elsa's dark past. As a result, we are given an insight into future books that may prove to be part of a compelling series. Coming back to this book, it didn't quite capture my imagination in the way that I had expected as it had such a broad storyline to cover. Hopefully, this will be resolved in the second book where the crime and characters will be developed in a balanced way..
Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

3.5
The first in Karen Ellis' Searcher's series leads readers down a dark path as FBI agent Elsa Myers races against time to find three young women who have mysteriously vanished while trying to come to terms with her father's impending death and the secrets his dying will release. Intense and speculative, Ellis' unreliable narrator hits hard as you slowly begin to understand the reasons behind the compulsions that drive her. The formulaic police procedurals blends with the small piquant glimpses into Myers memories. The climatic conclusion will leave some readers feeling vindicated with their own detective work while a small potential romance gives faint hope that our protagonist has a very good chance at moving forward.

I did not like the book. The dialog sounded immature and the characters shallow. The plot could be good but I only read about 60 pages before losing interest. I won't publish this online out of courtesy to the author. I may not be the best judge of these things.

Good start to a series, but it fell flat for me. The narrative style was a little confusing. The main character Elsa goes between past and present without warning.

I really enjoyed this book. I especially liked the way it kept going from past to present in the main character's life. All the characters were well developed and brought to life. The plot had a lot of suspense and action keeping you interested from beginning to end. I received this ebook from NetGalley for an honest review.

The author does an amazing job of weaving the characters lifes together, between past and present. Lots of twists that keeps you reading until the end.

This was a solid four stars working it’s way up to a 4.5. Elsa is an FBI agent in a special unit that searches for missing children. She is also a very troubled woman with a past history that makes many of her cases look simple. She is called in when an almost eighteen year old girl disappears. According to her family, she is a good girl, studies hard and does not get into trouble. A local detective in the NYPD has requested Elsa’s assistance based on her stellar reputation. Elsa is reluctant to become involved because she is also dealing with her father’s recently diagnosed terminal cancer and her sister and niece, but the more she learns about the case, the more involved she becomes. I won’t go any further because of spoilers, but will say this was remarkably well written and everyone has a voice. The ending is also positive in many ways. Thanks to Net Galley and Mulholland for an ARC for an honest review.

Karen Ellis does an amazing job of keeping you on the edge of your seat. The story line going back and forth between past and present is well done. Elsa is an amazing FBI agent with control issues. She is the requested agent on a missing teen case, that hits home and brings memories she is forced to address. Can't wait for the next one.

FBI agent Elsa Myers specializes in missing children. When a seventeen year old goes missing, she, despite her father critically ill in a hospital awaiting hospice care, teams up with an NYPD detective, Lex Cole, to find the girl.

Like so many protagonists, Elsa is a damaged individual and the narrative behind it as well as its longterm effects tends to eclipse the missing child plot. As is a popular format today, the story is told from multiple viewpoints and shifts between past and present.

A bit cliched and perhaps a little bit too good to believe, I still found it an engrossing read. I look forward to the next in the series where I hope some of the childhood trauma will be less prominent and Elsa will still be working with Lex.

Elsa excels in finding missing children, so when she is in the hospital visiting her dying father she gets called in to assist Lex, a police detective, in the disappearance of Ruby Haverstock. As they investigate and interview friends and family they get on the trail of the man who abducted her, and is casting a wider net than Ruby, and could ensnare someone Elsa cares about. But in addition to worrying about her father, Elsa has past demons from her childhood haunting her that could affect her ability to find Ruby if she's still alive. This is a solid crime novel, engaging without being page-turning compelling. It drives me a little nuts that it goes back and forth between Elsa as a child, and as an adult, as well as some of the young women in the book. While it helps provide backstory it also feels like it impedes the flow of the book some. That being said, it feels like a completely plausible story, with an interesting, flawed, but not overly damaged lead character in Elsa.

FBI Special Agent Elsa Myers is very good at her job, but she doesn't know how to deal with her father slowly dying from cancer and demons from her past. She could take time off from work to spend more time with her dad at the hospital, but she knows working is the only way she can cope. It keeps her from dwelling on her memories. She is called to assist on a case. A teenage girl is missing. Elsa pushes her personal life to the side, intent on finding the missing girl before it's too late.

At first, I had a hard time identifying with, or liking, Elsa Myers. Elsa is an excellent investigator and she's driven to solve cases, especially those involving children. But she has some deep emotional scars and is pretty much emotionally unavailable. The story flips from the current investigation to flashbacks about Elsa's childhood frequently. At first, I found the flashbacks a bit annoying. But by the end of the book, those flashes of insight into her past helped me understand the character better. By the end of the book, I liked Elsa as a main character. The development of her character over the course of the story is quite complex. I liked how little bits and pieces about Elsa were revealed as she discovered and followed up on clues in the missing person investigation.

A Map of the Dark is the first book in The Searchers series. Book 2, Last Night, turns its focus to Lex Cole, Elsa's temporary partner in A Map of the Dark.

Karen Ellis is a pseudonym for crime thriller author Katia Lief. A Map of the Dark is the first book by this author that I've read. I'm definitely going to read more! I liked the character development and slow-build pacing. I saw one aspect of the ending coming...but wasn't quite sure how it would work in with the story. All in all, a very enjoyable crime thriller. It kept my attention from start to finish. I binge read this entire book in one afternoon. I couldn't stop reading!

I am looking forward to book 2. Lex Cole was a bit of a background character in book 1 because it focused mainly on Elsa and her past. I'm so curious about how his story will develop in the second book!

**I voluntarily read a review copy of this book from Mulholland Books via NetGalley. All opinions expressed are entirely my own.**