New sheriff Bree Taggert is called to a shooting in a campground shuttered for the winter. But she arrives to find a perplexing crime. There is no shooter, no victim, and no blood. No one but Bree believes the sole witness, Alyssa, a homeless teenager who insists she saw her friend shot.

Bree calls in former deputy Matt Flynn and his K-9 to track the killer and search for Alyssa’s friend. They discover the battered corpse of a missing university student under the ice in Grey Lake—but it’s not the victim they were looking for.

When two more students go missing and additional bodies turn up, Bree must find the link between the victims. She knows only one thing for certain: the murders are fueled by rage. When Alyssa disappears, Bree must race against time to find her before her witness becomes another victim.

‘See Her Die‘ follows straight on from the events in the first Bree Tagget book, ‘Cross Her Heart‘, which saw Bree, a Philadelphia PD Detective with a notoriously traumatic childhood, called back to the small upstate New York town she was raised in by the news of her sister’s murder. 

By the end of ‘Cross Her Heart‘, Bree had abandoned her relatively solitary Philadelphia life which she shared mainly with her cat, had moved back to her home town and where she is sharing a house with her cat, a dog she inherited, her recently orphaned niece and nephew and her former (now retired) PPD partner who has taken on the role of surrogate grandmother, cook and childminder. To make her new life even more complicated, Bree has become the local Sheriff, a job she has no experience in. 

I thought that was a good set-up for an entertaining series that was more grounded than the typical loner-cop-with-a-traumatic-past-and-a-drink-problem.

.‘See Her Die’ was my first chance to see Bree in action as a Sheriff and assess whether this would blossom into a solid series. 

I was engaged and entertained from the start. 

The story arc for the ensemble cast of characters in Bree’s new life moved forward smoothly, grounding the series. 

The case Bree was working on was twisty enough to keep my interest without becoming a dry puzzle-solving exercise. The killer, the main suspects and witnesses felt plausible. The action was tense and the pace was well-judged except at the very end, where it meandered a little.

One of the things that makes the story work is Bree’s developing relationship with former Deputy Matt and his retired K9 Brody. This isn’t an insta-love thing. It moves slowly and credibly. It is complicated by Bree being mortally afraid of dogs, and Matt not feeling competent to use a gun since he was shot in the hand. There is a slow-burn romance here, but the part of the relationship that develops most is the rhythm they fall into in an investigation. Their different strengths and styles complement each other and make the book more interesting.

The only part of the book that didn’t work so well for me where the bits from the point of view of the unnamed killer. I thought they were a little clichéd and went on for too long.

‘See Her Die’ convinced me that I want to read the rest of the series in the expectation of watching Bree solve a set of solid mysteries and seeing what her life becomes. I’ve already bought the next five books, so I hope I’m right about that.