Found You by Molly Black

Found You is an FBI thriller and is the beginning of a series, but can be read as a standalone.

 

Rylie has issues. Anger issues, relationships with other people issues, and partner issues. So when she (once again) does exactly what she wants to solve the case, her boss (a rather nasty piece of work that even with his connections should never have had the power he did) decides it’s time for her to lose her job. Luckily, someone above him sends Rylie into another area, where she is tasked to find a killer who is stringing victims up on marker posts on a long stretch of highway.

 

Rylie feels this is beneath her and the fact that they have assigned her a partner far too happy for his own good, adds to her frustration. However, as she starts uncovering clues, she realises they could be very close to catching the killer. But the bodies keep coming. Will Rylie put her issues away long enough to get her head in the game?

 

So, as the book starts with Rylie, being a top FBI agent, forgetting to charge her phone while on an important case and needing it, it set the scene for things to come. Rylie is a very unlikeable character, who is selfish, mouths off for no reason, acts immaturely and impetuously, and treats others badly. Even if she does solve cases in her own way, I don’t see how she would have been tolerated. Her partner was fun and her rudeness towards him unjustified.

 

I think a lot was missed by not going deeper into her partner’s history (he was a SEAL but nothing came of it), more about the killer (he seemed cut and paste from many other books and was an “explain reasons why just before being foiled”), and making certain things more plausible. Rylie doesn’t sleep for a few days, survives on coffee and doughnuts, and then in a dramatic scene at the end needs a great deal of physicality that would not have been available to her body. The figuring out of the markers and the numbers… hmm, very suspect. Even (if I remember correctly and I might not as I wasn’t prepared to go back and find it) the killer says that the reason people would open their doors for him is that he looks safe yet later he is described as having something wrong with his face. I think I’d already started skimming parts because things didn’t add up. Then at the end, after falling down a mine shaft and realising her “spine was twisted unnaturally” she manages to straighten it. What???

 

The book had potential; I just wish the author had made the story more coherent and the characters more believable.