BOOK REVIEW: Come and Get Me by August Norman @crookedlanebks #comeandgetme #augustnorman #bookreview

A book with a fun, fierce, flawed female lead and a gripping mystery that had me hooked from the first chapter! August Norman’s Come and Get Me is his debut thriller featuring journalist Caitlin Bergman, who returns to her university decades later in order to accept her honorary degree. And then a local mystery catches her attention, and Caitlin decides maybe not to leave after-all. With a fast-pace and a memorable cast of characters, fans of strong female leads and intriguing mysteries will love this book!

About the Book

An intrepid journalist confronts a small town’s dark secrets in Come and Get Me, a breakneck thriller for fans of Tess Gerritsen and Julia Keller. 

At Indiana University, someone’s been studying the female student body:
 their dating customs, nocturnal activities―and how long they can survive in captivity. 

When award-winning journalist Caitlin Bergman is invited back to campus to receive an honorary degree, she finds an opportunity for a well-earned victory lap―and a chance to face the trauma that almost destroyed her as an undergrad. But her lap becomes an all-out race when a student begs her to probe an unsolved campus disappearance: Angela Chapman went out one Friday night and never came back. 

To find the missing woman, Caitlin must join forces with a local police detective and the department that botched her own case so long ago.
But while Caitlin follows the clues behind Angela’s disappearance, someone else is following her… 

Unearthing secrets hidden beneath an idyllic Midwestern college town, Caitlin must expose what really happened to Angela―before she herself becomes the newest addition to a twisted collection.

Reflection

Set primarily in the town of Bloomington, Indiana, Come and Get Me takes place largely on and around the college campus of Indiana University. I admit I am a sucker for any mystery set on a college campus. They are kind of these microcosms of society, fairly contained and filled with students, one of whom is sure to notice something. They are like a studious version of a small-town mystery. Plus, the grad student in me is excited by anything that occurs in close proximity to a good research library! I actually know Indiana’s campus quite well, since one of my older siblings went there. It’s absolutely beautiful—something people who haven’t been to Indiana may struggle to picture.

Caitlin Bergman left school a few credits shy of graduating two decades earlier in the wake of a horrific personal event that rocked her to her core. Since then, Caitlin went on to be an award-winning journalist, and the university invites her back to accept the degree that fell just out of her grasp. Caitlin is very interesting as a character, she’s so independent. Even her closest friends are kept at arm’s length. And learning Caitlin’s story from all of those years ago—it was quite powerful!

When Caitlin is approached to assist with a cold case of a student at the university that went missing two years prior, she isn’t sure she wants to get involved. She wasn’t left with the best memories of the town police department. But her journalistic instinct, as well as her empathy for the missing student, leads Caitlin to stay in town and investigate herself.

And it turns out, there may be more to the story than a single missing girl. Someone is stalking young women in the town, and another woman soon goes missing…

This book is wild and I admit that I had no clue who on earth the pieces of this mystery would come together! There were so many threads that Caitlin unearthed, and they seemed knotted but not necessarily related. But in a masterful plot structure, everything in the book does have a purpose in the conclusion of the mystery.

The last third of the novel was unexpected, dark, and had me on the edge of my seat! It really was like watching a scary movie, where my heart pounded and I also thought “Danger! Don’t go there! Don’t talk to that person! Run!”

Thank you to Crooked Lane Books for my copy. Opinions are my own.