I found Wordhunter to be engrossing, evocative, and exciting. Maggie is a fun character to read about. She reminds me of a cross between Spencer Reid from Criminal Minds and Lisbeth Salamander. I would be very interested to read the sequel if the author writes more. Thank you to Netgalley, Harper Perennial and Papeebacks, and Stella Sands for allowing me to read this ARC.

This was a solid read and it feels like there must be another book in the works because of how it ended. Speaking of Maggie, I think my favorite thing about her is that she is unapologetically Floridian. The mystery with who took Heidi felt pretty obvious, and the thing about people not being able to read backwards and needing a mirror to do so didn't seem accurate (though I can easily see kids using it as a "code"). Overall though I enjoyed reading this and I appreciated that it didn't ramble on unnecessarily.

Kindly received an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you to NetGalley for an ARC of Wordhunter.

A new mystery series featuring the latest gimmick, a young female rebel who is also a word savant.

One reviewer summed it up best; Maggie Moore is the white trash version of Lisbeth Salander, minus the computer hacking skills.

Maggie is even assaulted by someone in a position of power, just like Lisbeth was by her social worker.

Maggie is an alcoholic, pill popper, junk food eating, motorcycle riding linguistic genius living and working in the hellhole of Florida.

Also, she's haunted by the disappearance of her BFF, Lucy, from almost a decade ago, though the authorities didn't work hard to find Lucy since she wasn't anybody special.

When the daughter of a local mayor is abducted, Maggie is recruited by the police chief to analyze the abductor's notes, which leads to a shocking discovery.

I learned a lot about linguistics, how we talk and write unintentionally reveals a lot about who we are and where we come from, either originally or in a new state or country.

Maggie spends most of the narrative diagramming lines from famous novels, especially when she's stressed and angry.

I wasn't a fan of Maggie; I didn't dislike her but I felt the author crafted her character with a very heavy hand on purpose, like she was thinking, how can I make Maggie as hardcore as possible, using all the cliches and stereotypes available in the mystery/thriller genre?

I did like Jackson, another cliche, a detective who had a mental breakdown from a previous case that cost him his job and family and is seeking another chance to sort out his life and career.

Naturally, since this is a book, Maggie tags along with Jackson, which breaks who knows how many rules in how investigations are conducted.

This is also the second book in a row I've read in which the bad guys are in law enforcement. It was hard to suspend disbelief for.

Is this the new trend, the good guys are the bad guys? Surprise twist! It's not.

It felt the clues leading up to the big reveal was so obvious; of course, no one else figured it out but Maggie because everyone else is dumb as a sack of hair.

I might check out the next book in the series.

Just when you think you’ve read every iteration of sleuth-protagonist imaginable, you come across Stella Sands’ WORDHUNTER and her living-on-the-edge in central Florida, linguistic prodigy Maggie. Orphaned, barely able to support herself, mourning the mysterious loss of her best and only friend several years earlier, she’s only 21 years old. With her excessive smoking, drinking and drug use, her prospects look dim.
Contrast this, though, with a lightning quick mind, a photographic memory enabling her to quote passages at will from her voluminous reading and, best of all, a verbal tick: she diagrams sentences in her head, as a self-soothing device. And, she’s finishing up her graduate degree in Forensic Linguistics at just the time when the local police need an expert to help them in a missing child hunt. As she brings her skills and ingenuity to bear on the case, Maggie deals with aspects of her troubled past and slowly acknowledges the possibility of a better future.
I hope WORDHUNTER is the first in a planned series. Otherwise, I’d say there was too much time spent setting up Maggie’s character and backstory. Assuming she’ll go on utilizing her verbal gifts to solve more and more inexplicable crimes and less time sabotaging her life, I gave this book 5 stars. My only other caveat would be that readers not as obsessed with words as Maggie is, might find those parts of the book tedious.
But, as a former Latin teacher and long-time proponent of sentence diagramming, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Reading it was not another been-there, done-that experience.

After reading the synopsis, I had high hopes for this book. The idea of a linguistic savant assisting the police to solve crimes excited my inner geek-love for puzzles. It was a quick and easy read with an interesting storyline and a quirky main character, but the portrayal missed its mark for me. The dialogue was extremely disjointed and lacked any kind of emotion. It felt like I was reading in monotone, like someone was just stating a list of facts. There were parts where I should have cared or empathized with Maggie, but I didn't feel a connection to her or any of the characters at all. And to my disappointment, there weren't many puzzles to solve. Maggie was more obsessed with diagramming and analyzing sentence structure. This was kind of cool for what it was, but the diagrams were very hard to read on my Kindle. They would have been much easier to decipher if the sentences were written out prior to or above the diagram. The ending was cut and dry. All my questions were answered but summed up too neatly. I was hoping for a bit more elaboration and a more satisfying ending on the Ditmore issue. The storyline was left wide open, so I'm guessing that there will be a sequel. Overall, it was a decent read, it just didn't WOW me.

Thank you to the author, Harper Perennial and Paperbacks, and NetGalley for granting me early digital access in exchange for my honest review!

Wordhunter is a gimmick thriller. Which is to say that instead of focusing on he said/she said, one-of-the-spouses-did-it, past-secrets-resurfaced sort of thing, it concentrates instead of a quirky protagonist solving a present-day mystery.
The quick usually works, just look at all the undeserved praise Prose’s The Maid received. And the quirk here is that the protagonist is obsessed with words. That was the main draw for me with this book.
I love words. I spend most of my life with words. Albeit on a wildly different level from the protagonist, who diagrams them, catalogues them, analyzes them, and tatooes them on her skin.
I don’t think I realized how young of a protagonist this was, going into the book. She’s only twenty-one. Academically smart, very smart. Life-wise, not so much.
But hey, she may be the brightest young woman in Florida, the smartest white trash Floridian there is.
Florida of this novel is presented lusciously in all its trashy splendor, and for all her criticism of it, our protagonist is firmly a Floridian: a chain-smoking, Bud-drinking, motorcycle riding, junk eating (and junk taking), hard-living, potty-mouthed waitress … who also happens to be brilliant linguist, studying for her Master’s.
Basically, Liz Salander, Florida-edition.
But hey, someone’s gotta help out the local police to find missing girls. And so here she is.

Sands has made a career of true crime writing, before turning to fiction. And as far as fictional thrillers go, this is pretty solid for what it is, squarely hitting genre marks on trends and clichés. The word gimmick is neat. The book and its protagonist are obviously set up for serializing. The one thing to elevate it from the million other similar books is that is has a decency to be short in the genre that seems to love dragging itself out. So you get a lean, reasonably entertaining story that’s a quick and easy read. Nothing special, but perfectly decent. Thanks Netgalley.