We're excited to share a special blog post by Emily Winslow, author of Look for Her, on sale in paperback today!
About the Book:
Everyone loves a beautiful missing girl…
"Look For Her ratchets up the tension while also offering moments of sheer grace."-Riley Sager, bestselling author of Final Girls
"Beautifully written with an expertly twisty, surprising story, this is a must-read!” — Chevy Stevens, New York Times bestselling author of Never Let You Go
Lilling might seem like an idyllic English village, but it’s home to a dark history. In 1976, a teenage girl named Annalise Wood disappeared, and though her body was later discovered, the culprit was never found. Decades later, Annalise maintains a perverse kind of celebrity, and is still the focus of grief, speculation, and for one young woman, a disturbing, escalating jealousy.
When DNA linked to the Annalise murder unexpectedly surfaces, cold case detective Morris Keene and his former partner, Chloe Frohmann, hope to finally bring closure to this traumatized community. But the new evidence instead undoes the case's only certainty: the buried body that had long ago been confidently identified as Annalise may be someone else entirely, and instead of answers, the investigators face only new puzzles.
Whose body was unearthed all those years ago, and what happened to the real Annalise? Is someone interfering with the investigation? And is there a link to a present-day drowning with eerie connections? With piercing insight and shocking twists, Emily Winslow explores the dark side of sensationalized crime in this haunting psychological thriller.
From the Author:
I always start my books with a question I don't yet know the answer to. In this case: what really happened to missing teenager Annalise Wood?
I love beginning a project with the same sense of curiosity and suspense as my readers will. At about the halfway point, I do clarify for myself exactly how the book is going to resolve. I outline pretty tightly from there. But I love building that certainty on a foundation of open exploration.
Any novel that's going to have an important revelation or explanation at the end also needs to have alternate possibilities that fill the middle: all the biased assumptions, clever-but-wrong deductions, and perhaps manipulations that the characters and readers have to go through first. I love the psychology of shifting interpretations. As a reader, that's something I enjoy experiencing: an author showing me, through a convincing journey, that my initial assumptions were incorrect, and surprising me with something I hadn't thought of myself but which makes perfect sense once I see it their way.
One of the big challenges for the detectives in this story is that the case is forty years old and famous. Because there’s been so much media coverage over so long, a certain narrative has soaked in and affects everything, even memories. Getting back to just the bare facts so they can start fresh is not simple. I love thinking about how the most pervasive assumptions are invisible. We're so sure of them that we don't even think we're making a choice about what to believe.
I started my writing life as a puzzle designer, which is as fun as it sounds. One of the big differences between a puzzle mystery and a mystery novel is that, in a puzzle, all of the clues are available at once. The solver has to figure out which are relevant and what to do with them, but they have them all, right from the start. In a book, the solver is a character rather than the reader, and that character is on a gradual journey. The choices they make give them access to certain clues and not others. But even with puzzles, I tried to play with my solvers' assumptions and choices. Where are they looking? What are they expecting?
Because I write multiple first-person narrators, there is no one character who perfectly mimics the reader's journey. The reader, to me, is a character all their own, on a unique journey, with access to more information than any character in the book has, even the detectives. I hope they enjoy the ride!
Look for Her is on sale now. Start reading an excerpt, download the reading group guide, and order your copy today!
