Hide (Detective Harriet Foster)

For a mystery/thriller, this was...alright. It took me a bit to get into it and I almost decided to give up on it for a while until the mystery part really started getting underway. Once it got underway, I sped through the rest of it, but tbh, I never ended up caring about the main character. I really mostly got invested in the side plot with Amelia and Bodie. I love some good family secret drama and the effect that those secrets have on the people involved, and I felt like there was way more psychological fuckery and development in that part of the story than with Harriet. Harriet just sort of alternated between stoic/focused on work and sad the whole time and I sort of just...didn't care after a while lol.

But I'm 100% here for Amelia and Bodie finding out that they were kidnapped as children by a murderer and raised by him because he wanted to see if he could ~love, and the psychological (and practical) fallout of that. Even though we never met him, I really felt for their biological dad who died without knowing what happened to his family. Honestly, I felt more for a character who died before the story actually started than the main character of the novel, which feels like a sign that the main character wasn't too great lol.

I also really liked the last chapter and the hope that it focused on for Bodie. Wish I could find out more about what happens to him in his journey to start a new life rather than find out more about Harriet in the next book!

This gritty police procedural was intense. Harriet Foster is coming back to the police force after her partner died, and just before that her son was killed. She is not sure that she has anything to live for, but getting back to work feels like something. She is paired with a misogynist older cop at first in their search for the killer of a young girl on a public trail. More deaths occur and lots of cop politicking happens. There was a lot of blood and gore in this one, but ultimately good won out. I guess we can't expect much more than that from life. Harriet proves herself to be a savvy detective and tougher than she had feared at the outset.