Found
Irene Cooper
North Street Book Prize 2023 (view all the winners)
First Prize, Genre Fiction
Critique by Jendi Reiter
Irene Cooper's psychological thriller Found features a grieving mother with a preternatural ability to find the bodies of missing children. With beautiful writing and distinctive characters, Found is both a literary study of bereavement and a twisty, atmospheric police procedural that bears comparison to successful mystery writers like Rachel Howzell Hall and Rene Denfeld. Found shares some elements with Denfeld's The Child Finder, one of my favorite mystery novels: the small-town Pacific Northwest setting, the female investigator haunted by family trauma, and the search for a perpetrator who targets children. But Cooper's book is truly original and significant for our political moment, weaving in contemporary issues such as anti-abortion fanaticism and the gentrification of cannabis.
Ten years after her young daughter's accidental drowning in the Colorado River, Eleanor Clay continues to punish herself. She has pushed away her ex-husband and surviving son, and devotes herself to her freelance work for the Bristlecone Springs police department. She feels she doesn't deserve to shed the stigma of death. But then, for the first time, she discovers an abducted child who's still alive, and then another, and another…as a serial criminal seems to be playing a game to lure her in. Against her will, she is drawn back into the world of the living, through her collaboration with a forensic botanist and and an enthusiastic young bicycle patrolman who become her close friends. Yet not everyone in her circle is what they appear to be.
John Yearling, the megachurch pastor and brewery entrepreneur, is an exception to Cooper's gift for creating unique and three-dimensional characters. The slick and hypocritical Yearling isn't an unfair portrait of "family values" preachers, but he's not much more than that. Either as the villain or as a red herring, he's a little too obvious.
The book cover design was excellent, combining the subtlety of literary fiction in its abstract design, and the tension of a thriller with its black and red contrasts and the title in large red capital letters. The interior typeface was large, elegant, and readable. However, there was a pervasive typo problem, with missing spaces between words throughout the book. This odd combination of great layout and poor proofreading was something we encountered several times in Atmosphere Press books this year.
Found is a top-notch thriller with a slow buildup of clues that lead to a cinematic life-or-death showdown. The plot twists are unpredictable but always believable, arising from newly revealed facets of the characters rather than any Hollywood-style coincidences. Books this good make my job easy!
