Jenna Bush Hager Developing THE FEATHER THIEF

I loved this book! It’s perfect for fans of mystery books with a lead that works on cases in a job that goes to every crime scene. Rita Todacheene is an overworked crime scene photographer and her ability to see the dead sometimes helps in that she can get the info needed to know what really happened to the victim. However, as she’s been warned her entire life, seeing the dead comes with a very dangerous possibility of harm which she’s about to experience when one victim is hellbent on revenge and not letting Rita live her life in peace until she gets what she wants. I love Rita’s character and especially the back and forth of seeing her present life and watching her grow up with her grandmother on the Navajo reservation, getting to see how she got into photography (her grandmother had a box camera), and watching her grapple with learning that she sees ghosts. It has a mixed tone of being a dark-ish procedural and also a beautiful book about with her relationship with her grandmother. I would absolutely read another book following Rita and also anything else Ramona Emerson writes.

(TW okay I’m just going with everything — not so much because of dark, although it does graphically describe two crime scenes, but because so many cases and things are discussed that at some point it hits everything and this would have been a paragraph of notes.)

For fans of missing persons, small towns full of secrets, and Australian crime novels. Detective Sergeant Sarah Michaels is sent into a small rural town when 12-year-old Esther goes missing after school. From there a shocking arrest is made, fingers are pointed, and a woman tells her friend that the man she married assaulted her when she was a teen. We get to know members of this town as the POV changes from Esther’s friends, family, a Greek chorus, and detectives. Surely, someone must know what happened to Esther? This is a good read if you want to be sunk into a particular time and place as a missing person case is used to explore human nature, violence, trauma, victim blaming, and grief.

(TW discuses case with child predators/ ableism/ homophobia/ recounts past teen gang rape, details on the lead up not much graphic details on the act/ fatphobia/ alcoholism/ domestic abuse/ brief animal abuse recounted)