A Map of the Dark by Karen Ellis (thoughts)

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!