Have You Seen Her? - Karen Rose

Another day, another Karen Rose, this time, “Have you seen her” a killer is kidnapping sixteen year old cheerleaders, torturing and raping them and then leaving them out for super Special Agent Thatcher to find.

Meanwhile Thatcher’s son has gone from star pupil to basket case and his too good to be true teacher Dr Jenna Marshall is concerned. One meeting with Thatcher and she is madly in love despite being celibate since her fiancee died and the feeling is mutual Thatcher struggles to control himself around Jenna despite the fact that he too has been celibate since her wife ran off with another man and died on her way to the airport. I mean fancy that, two attractive, successful celibate people falling in love the first time they bloody meet? This time Rose gives much less voice to the murderer, instead preferring to tell the story through Thatcher and Jenna.

Jenna is refusing to pass the schools star Quarterback until he actually does some work and the Quarterbacks creepy papa is encouraging the rest of the team to haze her, slashing her tires, hanging dead animals in her lab and innocently cutting her breaks. Just boy stuff… crazy boy stuff.

Meanwhile the killer is fairly pissed off that nobody is recognizing him for the absolute genius he is and decides to up the ante, chopping one of his girls into pieces and scattering her around with big helpful signs pointing her out like “LEG” and “ARM”

You quickly realize that the killers main target is Jenna, his first attempt it thwarted by her two massive dogs but he’s not put off, he’s not a big fan of Thatcher either, who he rightly presumes to be an idiot. He’s spot on, my biggest pet peeve about this novel is that Thatcher is literally useless, he does nothing to solve the crime, the legwork is all done by his team and visiting Detective Davies, who almost had the killer back in Seattle but mishandled evidence meant he was set free and left to set up in Thatcher’s back yard. Like literally they never even CHECK OTHER CITIES for similar crimes until shady Davies pops up to point out how shit Thatcher is at his job.

Davies fancies a bit of Jenna too and there is a lot of unneeded tension and behavior that detracts from the interesting bits of the novel: the murders. There is also some more of Roses romantically suspenseful sex scenes which are wayyyyyyy cringier than the ones in the review below. She wrote this one before I'm Watching You so hopefully, as her novels progress there is less sex and more story.

I gave it a two, it had potential but it was nowhere near as good as I’m Watching You and again, Rose dedicated way to many pages to dodgy sex scenes and the budding romance of two people who did not belong together. The killer wasn’t a massive shock either. It hasn’t put me off her work but I’d like to read something that’s more solidly a crime novel with less of a romantic feel.