“There’s no rewind, or erasing, or unmaking. The things that happened, they are you, you are them. You can escape, but you can’t get away. Just the way it is.”

It only took me almost a year, but I finally made it. Find Her is the most recent addition to Lisa Gardner’s D.D. Warren series, aka Adult Nancy Drew. The book was actually the reason that I started reading the D.D. Warren series to begin with, so I’m glad I finally got to circle back around to it seven books (and 10 months) later.

Flora Dane, an innocent and naive girl, found herself separated from her friends during Spring Break and nothing was ever the same again. Flora was kidnapped from the sunny Florida beach and held in captivity, inside (and out of) a small wooden box, for 472 days. Miraculously, though, she manages to escape her real life nightmare and tries to return to a normal life.

But Flora can’t really leave her nightmare behind. Since her escape five years ago, she’s worked to make sure that no one else has to go through what she did — though her tactics are a bit guerilla. One night, while working her recon, Flora finds herself bound and gagged in a dank garage, her only company the exceptionally muscular man that put her there. But she’s not a victim any more, she refuses to be, so she does the only thing she knows how to do. She escapes. Again. And she takes the man down in the process. Enter D.D. Warren.

D.D. is not a fan of vigilante justice, so she has some questions for the girl. But, not long after her run-in with D.D., Flora disappears. Again. And this time, she doesn’t surface in someone’s garage. She doesn’t surface in a seedy motel. She doesn’t surface at all. Suddenly D.D. knows, without a shadow of a doubt, that something is very, very wrong. And it’s her job to make sure Flora the Survivor returns — it’s her job to Find Her. (lol get it? SO corny, I know.)

I love D.D. and I love all of Lisa Gardner’s stories. They keep you guessing, keep you turning the page and keep you up at night because “just one more chapter, Mom!”. The end of this one had a massive twist I didn’t see coming  but that made everything come together magically. So, so good.

My favorite scene: Very early on in the story, Flora is forcefully taken from a bar where she’s doing a little recon work surrounding the disappearance of a young college co-ed. Flora wakes up, bound and naked, in a garage and the race is on to save herself before her captor takes that option away. Flora’s able to find the tools she needs to escape in a bag of rotting garbage in the corner of the garage and she does what she does best — survive. I really liked this scene because it gave you a good sense, right off the bat, of who Flora is and what she’s capable of. You know she’s a fighter, you know she’s resourceful and you know that she’s going to do what it takes. You go, girl.

Grade: ★★★★★