Review: "Have You Seen Her" by Catherine McKenzie

Have You Seen Her by Catherine McKenzie
Published June 2023 via Atria Books
★★★

Cassie needs an escape, and there's no better place for that than the woods. It's to the woods she goes, then, to work in Search and Rescue. But Cassie has secrets—and so do the people around her.

I am always looking for hiking books. SAR books. Stuck-in-the-woods books. For reasons I cannot explain, I both want to spend all my time in the woods, not getting lost or being murdered by axemen, and also read a lot about people...uh...in the woods, sometimes getting lost or being murdered by axemen. Somehow these two desires have managed to coexist (peacefully, without axe-murder!) so far.

You can imagine, then, my pleasure at finding a mystery set almost entirely in a national park, with SAR work and hiking aplenty. (In another life, I want to be a backwoods ranger. In this life, I love reading about it, but there aren't all that many novels that fit the bill.) McKenzie has done her research here, and I love the details about hasty searches and the high proportion of callouts that don't amount to much. Cassie loves the work she's doing, but she's also aware that a lot of what goes wrong in national parks boils down to "people are really, really stupid sometimes".

Have You Seen Her moves quickly—I read the bulk of it on a three-hour flight, and the time (along with pages and plane, I guess) flew. I have mixed feelings about twists in general, and this book has a fairly significant one. On the one hand, I didn't see it coming (hurray); on the other hand, the mysteries that make me happiest are the ones in which things are as they seem, I'm afraid for the character throughout, and the narrator isn't hiding anything big from the reader. I'm afraid that any more I say will veer into spoiler territory, so I'll leave it at that, but this will be a better fit for those who want twisty and turny than for those who want something more straightforward. Still, a solidly satisfying read when I haven't been able to escape into the woods recently.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.