NUMBER one best-selling author of Write About Me Melissa Pouliot has pieced together another detective novel, inspired by a true missing person tragedy.
You’ll Never Find Me continues to centre on Pouliot’s main character, detective Rhiannon McVee, whose friends and cases make up a thriller plot as she explores both the detective work and the emotional strain endured by people whose loved ones are missing.
Pouliot explores the fate of those left behind well, which could be due to her lived experience of the disappearance of her first cousin, Ursula Dianne Barwick, in 1987, a case detectives are still investigating.
You’ll Never Find Me follows McVee from country to city as this gritty detective follows the leads of a handful of missing people. It makes for an interesting read as the book darts from one character to the next and reveals piece by piece McVee’s detective work. All the while McVee is managing a long-distance relationship with cowboy Mac, a welcome balance to the sadness of the novel’s main theme.
Having not read the previous novels it did not take me long to get hooked and realise You’ll Never Find Me is just as good as a stand-alone book. The characters are everyday, relatable people. Among them is Sarah-Jayne Heart, who goes for an afternoon walk in Bourke and never returns, and a Sydney teenager who gets mixed up in the wrong crowd and sees too much.
In Pouliot’s own words, her writing is “a desire to help the broader community understand what it’s like when someone you love goes missing”. One thing that stays with you after reading this book is that families of missing persons rarely get closure. There will always be a gap that a missing loved one once filled.