FOUND

In this novel, a woman with a “macabre talent” for finding missing bodies seeks justice and personal closure when she helps police with a recent spate of kidnappings.

Eleanor Clay is brought in by the Bristlecone Springs Police Department for her unique brand of help in the case of missing 3-year-old Lizzie Barrett. She has found 18 children for the department over the last decade, and Det. Gordon Stanislaus is confident she will be successful: “She would find the child, and that child would be dead, case closed.” Eleanor does locate Lizzie, but the girl is still alive, albeit barely. This is new for Eleanor. As child kidnappings mount (three in two months), she aligns herself with CorpsPursuit, a volunteer consortium of forensic scientists who look for bodies in cold cases. “I came here thinking you might be able to help me understand what I’ve been doing all these years, and then maybe I’d have somewhere to start, you know, some way to figure out why it’s changed,” she tells Althea Giordano, formerly with the London Police and a botanist with CorpsPursuit. Eleanor is beset with considerable psychological turmoil. Her own daughter drowned years ago, and her body was never recovered. It drove a wedge between her and her husband, who are separated but not divorced, as well as her teenage son, Levi. Cooper has crafted a textured series opener that’s part gripping mystery and part an involving character study that sets up CorpsPursuit as a going concern. She writes with a keen eye: The letter seeking CorpsPursuit volunteers “had been printed out and posted on the Bristlecone Springs bulletin board and had since been nearly papered over with notices of community service days and for sale flyers.” Eleanor’s “domestic superpower” is a bit confusing at first (why do the police wait to bring her in on cases?), but the author populates the story with fleshed-out characters worthy of their own series, such as charismatic bicycle patrol officer Elan DePena, who initially refers to Eleanor as “the grim reaper.” The growth of their mutually beneficial partnership is one of the novel’s pleasures.

A well-written and auspicious mystery series opener.