Lisa Gardner’s Find Her Sheds Light on What Lurks in the Dark

Find Her introduces us to Florence “Flora” Dane, a young woman who was kidnapped as a college student on spring break in Florida. She was tortured, abused, repeatedly assaulted, and imprisoned in a pine coffin for 472 days by a serial sexual predator—but she made it out alive.
Now, five years later, Flora is a survivor. But within the book’s first chapters, she’s once again the victim of a kidnapping. But is that all there is to the story? Is she less a victim than a reckless vigilante? That’s how it appears when D.D. Warren, on restricted duty because of an injury incurred in the line of duty, first meets Flora at the scene of a crime. Devon Goulding, a Boston bartender and body builder, has just been burned to death in his own garage, and Flora—stripped naked with her hands bound—is the woman who killed him. Matters are further complicated by the fact that Flora refuses medical attention at the scene and is willing to talk to nobody but her FBI victim advocate, Samuel Keynes, who seems to understand her better than most—but even he can’t fully comprehend what Flora has been through.
This isn’t the Flora who disappeared that day in Florida. That Flora is gone forever. And her mother and brother, as loving and supportive as they are, and as grateful as they are to have her home, don’t know how to handle her.
Flora is no damsel in distress. After her first kidnapping ordeal, she became an expert in self-defense and survival, determined to never again be someone’s victim. But she also became a woman possessed—obsessed with other cases similar to her own, even going so far as to paper the walls of her bedroom with their stories. She wants to bring other kidnapped girls like her home, and other offenders to justice, but at what cost?
Gardner’s compelling, ripped-from-the-headlines (and your nightmares) story alternates among D.D.’s investigation into Flora’s disappearance, Flora’s current situation, and flashbacks to the torture she endured at the hands of Jacob Ness, the sadistic man who abducted her in Florida. The different perspectives offer readers information about who Flora is now—a victim, a perpetrator, or something in between? This dark, highly engaging read gives amazing insight into the psychology of both predator and prey.