First to Find / Morgan C. Talbot

Reviewed by: BigAl

Genre: Mystery/ Woman Sleuth

Approximate word count: 60-65,000 words

Availability    

Kindle  US: YES  UK: YES  Nook: YES  Smashwords: YES  Paper: YES

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Author:

“Morgan is an outdoorsy girl with a deep and abiding love for the natural sciences. Her degrees involve English and jujitsu. She enjoys hiking, camping, and wandering in the woods looking for the trail to the car, but there isn't enough chocolate on the planet to bribe her into rock climbing.

When she's not writing, she can be found making puzzles, getting lost on the way to geocaches, reading stories to her children, or taking far too many pictures of the same tree or rock.

She lives in Eastern Washington with her family.”

Description:

“Death is the hardest puzzle to solve.

Margarita Williams escaped death at a young age, but its shadow has followed her all her life. Now, amidst the chaos of a new Australian roommate and mysterious, menacing neighbors, Death has set the puzzlemaker a puzzle of her own. Someone is killing her fellow geocachers, one by one.”

Appraisal:

For those not familiar with the term, geocaching is a kind of treasure hunt where participants start with clues, which are used to get the longitude and latitude of the location of a “cache.” The geocacher then finds the physical cache using these coordinates and a portable GPS. It is kind of like a treasure hunt and appeals to those who like puzzles as well as outdoor activities.

First to Find (a term for the first person to find a new cache) is a murder mystery that revolves around a group of geocachers. When one of them is killed under mysterious circumstances the protagonist, Margarita, starts gathering and putting together clues (not unlike her approach to creating and solving geocache puzzles) in an attempt to discover who is behind the killing. It’s a story sure to appeal to geocachers, but for anyone not familiar with this activity, it’s still a fun book. I’ve never geocached, although I was vaguely aware of what it was and how it worked, and found that aspect of it interesting. This also took the story outside of a typical mystery for me, making it less predictable. Even if you’ve never heard of geocaching before, if you’re into solving puzzles (which is almost surely the case for any mystery lover), then First to Find won’t disappoint.

Format/Typo Issues:

No significant issues.

Rating: **** Four stars

In conjunction with the release of this book, Red Adept Publishing is having a blog tour, which we're happy to be participating in, as well as a contest, which you can find out more about here, as well as enter below.

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