Look For Her by Emily Winslow
Published by William Morrow on February 13, 2018
Pages: 304
Source: the publisher
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Everyone loves a beautiful missing girl…

“Look For Her ratchets up the tension while also offering moments of sheer grace.”-Riley Sager, bestselling author of Final Girls

“Beautifully written with an expertly twisty, surprising story, this is a must-read!”
— Chevy Stevens, New York Times bestselling author of Never Let You Go

Lilling might seem like an idyllic English village, but it’s home to a dark history. In 1976, a teenage girl named Annalise Wood disappeared, and though her body was later discovered, the culprit was never found. Decades later, Annalise maintains a perverse kind of celebrity, and is still the focus of grief, speculation, and for one young woman, a disturbing, escalating jealousy.

When DNA linked to the Annalise murder unexpectedly surfaces, cold case detective Morris Keene and his former partner, Chloe Frohmann, hope to finally bring closure to this traumatized community. But the new evidence instead undoes the case’s only certainty: the buried body that had long ago been confidently identified as Annalise may be someone else entirely, and instead of answers, the investigators face only new puzzles.

Whose body was unearthed all those years ago, and what happened to the real Annalise? Is someone interfering with the investigation? And is there a link to a present-day drowning with eerie connections? With piercing insight and shocking twists, Emily Winslow explores the dark side of sensationalized crime in this haunting psychological thriller.

I received this book for free from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Review:

Look For Her by Emily Winslow involves two detectives working to solve a cold case from the 1970’s: young Annalise Wood’s body was discovered years after she went missing. Now new DNA evidence has surfaced, and detectives are searching for new leads. This is a quick-moving, character-driven detective story. There are multiple perspectives, including the POV of a girl that is more than a little bit obsessed with the missing/murdered girl and the POV of the therapist that sees a couple of clients that are connected to this case. Some of the characters are a little on the sketchy side, and while this sometimes frustrated me as a reader, I think this was intentional and only added to the tension and mystery of the story.

Because this was a decades-old cold case, and because there were some unreliable sketchy characters, and for other reasons: there were several dead ends. There were also some character deaths and some therapist-client privilege and several things that made it nearly impossible for me to figure out any part of this case. The twist at the end was spectacular.

I’m curious about Detectives Morris Keene and Chloe Frohmann. While they get along just fine now, it is clear that they had a fight or a falling-out of some sort in the previous story, and while it alluded to this multiple times, I never could get a firm enough grasp on what happened to really understand why these two began the story at odds. I never could shake the fact that these two had a major history that I wasn’t privy to. More than either of the detectives, I felt a connection to the therapist that was dealing with grief over losing her first husband — even while married to her second. I’m not sure if she is a regular character in this series or not, but her relationships with her family and her thought processes were fascinating to me. All of this being said, this book is written as a standalone, but it is in fact the fourth in the Keene and Frohmann series. Be aware that past cases are mentioned and that it will make you want to go back and start at the beginning of the series.

Sidenote: the way communities and people grieve over victims is fascinating and this story is a great reminder of this. It is interesting to see how some victims are mourned and grieved, and kept alive through the media and word of mouth for months or years; others are forgotten quickly. This book is not heavy-handed with that sentiment at all, but it is just something that I reflected on while I was reading and even after I finished the book as I thought about real life news stories for a few minutes.

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