Review of The Child Finder (Naomi Cottle #1) by Rene Denfeld

I love a frigid setting, and Rene Denfeld's The Child Finder immerses the reader in an icy, wild forest as instinctive, savvy, and haunted private investigator Naomi Cottle seeks the truth about a young girl's disappearance.

This book is dark and beautiful, with such expansive descriptions of the mountains, the closed-in forests, and the traps and dangers of the winter and the wild that I could almost feel the cold.

The elements that feel potentially familiar or could have felt overused from use in other stories (a tough, closed-off investigator, broken by her past; a strong, kind man’s singular, devoted but unrequited love for her; the general outline of the disturbing situation at the heart of the book’s main case) are cushioned by Denfeld’s skillful setting of the scene and lovely shaping of the story. This was a fast and engrossing read.

There's a second book in this Naomi Cottle series, The Butterfly Girl, which I haven't yet read, and Denfeld also wrote The Enchanted, which I found haunting and arresting, as well as Sleeping Giants.

I mentioned The Child Finder in the Greedy Reading List Six Chilly Books to Read in the Heat of Summer.

More missing-person stories

If you like unlikely heroines and missing-person plots, you might also like Before She Disappeared.

And check out this link for more Bossy reviews of novels with missing-persons plots.