A Map of the Dark

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

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.

“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.

Summary from Goodreads:

"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:

I absolutely love when I find a new mystery series to follow and enjoy! I am such a sucker for a good mystery so as soon as I found about this book I just knew that I had to read it. It was just as good as I had hoped it would be after reading that description. One of the things that I just can never seem to get enough of are books where the main characters have dark pasts that they need to overcome. This book pulled me into it from the very beginning. Elsa is joining in on the hunt for a missing girl while she is also trying to deal with the fact that her father is dying. She is struggling with memories from her childhood alongside of all of this. All of this was enough to really suck me into this story! I just couldn't stop reading. I found that Elsa had a few similarities to the main character in Gillian Flynn's Sharp Objects in the way that she dealt with things that happened to her in her childhood (and whose name completely escapes me). In both cases, it really set a darker tone to the books than I had previously expected. I really enjoy darker mysteries so this was just one of the reasons why I enjoyed this book so much! I also really enjoyed the way that this author ended this book even though I found that not all of it was a surprise to me. There were things that I may have saw coming but it didn't matter because by then I was so invested on seeing how everything would turn out.

Overall, I found this to be a thrilling mystery that I just didn't want to set down. I sometimes feel like I read slower on my Kindle (not sure why or if that is really even true) but that certainly wasn't the case with this book. I just didn't want to stop reading! I liked that I was so pulled into the mystery portion of this book, but really it was the characters that I came to care about. That's why I'm so excited that this is just the first book in a planned series because I loved the characters and want more! I will certainly be waiting impatiently to get my hands on book two! I'm really glad that I didn't wait too long to read this book because this is an author to watch in my opinion. Highly recommended!

Bottom Line: A solid beginning to this new series! I need more!

Disclosure: I received a copy of this book thanks to the publisher and NetGalley.

This book was published on January 2nd 2018 if you are interested!

This novel is a promising start to a new series. Ellis digs deeper than most with this psychological tale and the rewards are vast. Elsa Myers manages to separate herself from a long line of female FBI agents and will hopefully be leading readers on complex journeys for a very long time to come.

A Map of the Dark is a strong start to a new series. It starts as just a missing girl case that soon turns into something more serious. That path the case takes FBI Agent Elsa Myers is a complicated one as she has her own dark struggles and past she must cope with. The plot is multi-layered and unpredictable. I look forward to book 2. Highly recommended to readers who enjoy Tana French or Gillian Flynn.