"Find Me" by Alafair Burke; Harper (304 pages, $26.99)
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The friendship between Hope Miller and Lindsay Kelly runs deeper than most.
It began 15 years ago, when Lindsay happened upon an overturned SUV on a lonely, dark New Jersey road. Lindsay, a police chief’s daughter, quickly called for help and gave emergency first aid to the young woman splayed unconscious on the pavement.
When the woman was loaded into an ambulance, “her arm moved, as if reaching for Lindsay.” The rescuer jumped in, and the two have been friends ever since.
Not that it’s been easy. Hope recovered physically from the accident, but she suffered complete memory loss — she has no recall of her life before the crash, and no trace of her identity was found. Hope Miller is the name she chose for herself because she can’t remember her real one. But she and Lindsay are inseparable.
That friendship is at the core of "Find Me," the irresistible new thriller by Alafair Burke. The daughter of crime fiction master James Lee Burke, she has written three mystery series, including six books co-written with the late Mary Higgins Clark, and several stand-alone thrillers. She currently serves as the president of Mystery Writers of America and is the first woman of color to be elected to that position. A former prosecutor, she teaches criminal law at Hofstra University and lives in Manhattan and East Hampton, New York.
"Find Me," Burke’s 20th novel, brings back one of her series characters who’s been on hiatus since 2014, New York Police Detective Ellie Hatcher. Ellie will cross paths with Lindsay, who’s now a defense attorney living in Manhattan, after Hope decides to start a more independent life by moving from Lindsay’s hometown in New Jersey to East Hampton, a small town on Long Island.
There, Hope finds a cottage to rent and a job staging houses for a real estate agent. And then she vanishes.
When Hope stops answering calls and texts, Lindsay’s devoted boyfriend, Scott, advises her not to worry. But Lindsay heads for East Hampton and finds the cottage empty and Hope’s boss unhappy that she stopped showing up for work — especially right after he’d loaned her $2,000.
Lindsay is infuriated by the lackadaisical attitude of Carter Decker, the local cop she reports Hope’s absence to; he clearly thinks Hope is missing by her own choice, “a grifter who’d moved on to her next mark.”
Until, that is, a spray of Luminol reveals a bloodstain inside the front door of the house Hope was staging on the last day she was seen.
Then a body is found floating in the local marina — but it’s not Hope’s.
The DNA tests of the bloodstain bring a shocking result: It’s “connected to a string of killings committed in Wichita, Kansas, by a serial killer called the College Hill Strangler.”
That’s how Ellie gets connected to Hope’s case: Ellie’s father was a Wichita police detective who investigated the College Hill Strangler murders.
But how could the long-ago serial killer case be connected to Hope’s disappearance now? What about the body in the marina? And does any of it link to Hope’s lost life, the years hidden behind the blank wall of her memory loss?
And how do you search for a woman who has no identity?
The Hamptons are usually associated with the celebrities and hedge-funders who have luxurious vacation homes there — the house Hope was staging when she disappeared was a $3 million teardown.
But Burke draws most of her East Hampton characters from those who live there year-round, the working-class people whose jobs help make the posh lifestyles possible. It’s an interesting look at the social dynamics of resort towns that gives the book another layer.
It’s good to see Ellie back in action, too, hard-driving as ever but haunted by her own ghosts.
Burke’s arrangement of all the puzzle pieces is wickedly clever, as are the twists she gives them just when you think you know something. "Find Me" is beautifully crafted, a swift and gripping read. And those twists keep coming at you until the very last sentence.
