Review: Nearly Found

NEARLY FOUND
Nearly Gone #2
Elle Cosimano
Young Adult/Mystery
384 pages
Kathy Dawson Books/Penguin
Available Now
Source: ALA Midwinter

THE STORY (from Goodreads)
After Nearly Boswell starts working as an intern at a crime lab, a girl from her trailer park turns up dead. Then the corpse of a missing person is discovered, buried on a golf course, with a message for Nearly etched into the bones. When Nearly finds out the corpse is the father of Eric, a classmate of hers, she starts to worry that the body is connected to her father's disappearance five years ago. Nearly, Reece, and Nearly's classmates--Vince, Jeremy, and Eric--start a dangerous investigation into their fathers' pasts that threatens Nearly's fragile romance with Reece, and puts all them in the killer's path.

MY THOUGHTS
Nearly Found reunites us with math and science whiz Nearly Boswell as she manages to land herself in the middle of murderous trouble once again, the events of the previous book coming back to haunt her in a way she never imagined possible. While this second installment flows well and puts forth a solid mystery, it does magnify some of the issues–primarily with how Nearly goes about solving the case–that were easily overlooked in its predecessor, resulting in a few more moments of frustration than we might have hoped for going in.

It’s to be assumed that when a teenager inserts herself into a murder investigation and puts the burden of proof squarely on her own shoulders we’re going to have to suspend disbelief in a few areas and just roll with the fact that reporting any threats or evidence to the police is likely not going to be first on the list of things to do. While going with the flow was fairly easy to do in book one, Nearly takes keeping secrets and withholding evidence to an entirely new level in this story, her actions causing an outraged yell to rise in our throats as she continually makes things worse for herself. She even goes so far as to steal evidence from the lab at which she’s interning, and though a few consequences are mentioned in passing, in the end she gets a free pass on her highly illegal evidence tampering.

Frustrations with the degree to which believability is stretched aside, Ms. Cosimano knows how to keep us turning the pages, desperate to uncover who’s behind the new science-based threats and who we might lose along the way. As mentioned previously, things do wrap up nice and neat for Nearly despite the extremes to which so goes in the course of her investigation, but for readers like myself, an ending in which we’re left with very few questions is far preferable to one where we have no answers at all. While not as strong as Nearly Gone, Nearly Found is still a thoroughly entertaining read, and I look forward to whatever Ms. Cosimano is going to gift us with next.

Rating: 3.5/5

Find Elle:

Website • Facebook • Twitter • Goodreads • Amazon

This book was sent to me by the publisher free of charge for the purpose of a review. 

I received no other compensation and the above is my honest opinion.