My thanks to Random House U.K. Cornerstone for an eARC via NetGalley of ‘One Step Too Far’ by Lisa Gardner in exchange for an honest review.

This is Lisa Gardner’s second book to feature Frankie Elkin, a woman seeking personal redemption by assisting in locating missing persons, especially those cases that are not given priority by the authorities.

She’s not a private investigator and funds her investigations by taking temporary bartending jobs, even though she is a recovering alcoholic. She moves from place to place and avoids personal ties.

The case in ‘One Step Too Far’ focuses on a group of friends who five years ago headed into the woods near the town of Ramsey, Wyoming for a stag party weekend. One of the group disappeared and despite numerous search parties, he remains missing.

His father and the surviving four friends are undertaking a final search and are headed to a remote canyon accompanied by a local guide, a BigFoot enthusiast, and Daisy, a trained cadaver dog and her handler. After so long they can only hope to find his remains so he can be properly buried and bring closure to his parents.

Missing person specialist Frankie Elkin is drawn by the story and despite having no wilderness experience she talks her way into accompanying the group. However, it isn’t long before things begin to go drastically wrong.

This novel starts out quite slowly but oh my the tension builds and builds and Gardner certainly delivers on the nail-biting thrills with plenty of details as the story is told by Frankie.

Definitely recommended as ‘One Step Too Far’ is the kind of thriller that’s impossible to put down.

Stayed up far too late a couple of nights to read this as the further you get in the book the more chapters seem to end on cliffhangers which I love in a suspense thriller.

Having finished the book last night and had a bit of time to reflect I would say that this book is very far fetched, the characters weren’t loveable (apart from Daisy!) but it was a great escape and kept me entertained.

Thank you to #NetGalley and the publishers for a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review. #OneStepTooFar

I loved the first Frankie Elkin book so couldn't wait to get stuck in to book 2!
Frankie is a great character, with a troubled history and goes looking for missing people, who sometimes have demons of their own.
The market of books about missing people is heavily saturated now, so I need a good juicy story to really make it's mark on my memory.
This one was a good one, but didn't thrill me as much as the first book. There were loads of characters to keep track of and in the absence of a cast list, I need to start note making! I think the ending would have made more impact on me had I followed the characters better.
Overall, a strong addition to the series, and I look forward to the next installment, providing Gardner chooses to continue it.

Loved the 2nd book and now need the 3rd ! It kept me guessing through each page, kept me up till it was finished. Well written and planned . Loved it
Thanks as always to NetGalley and Randon House Uk, Cornerstone for the early read

I thought I'd read a book by this author before but out turns out I hadn't. I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed it even though I hadn't read the first in the series. I like cold cases in general and the intrigue and suspense I this one puts it a cut above most of the pack. I hope that this isn't the last we see of Frankie and I think I need to go back and read the first book.

this book is defiantly a thrillers that will keep you guessing and on the edge of your seat. Secrets spill within the main group and out and there is a shadowy presence which is a constant on the background. I loved the writing style which is brisk and sharp and i found the narrator Frankie Elkin such an interesting character, she is a recovering alcoholic with no steady roots anywhere. a face paced thriller with many twists and turn.

If I’d known this was a follow on from the last book I had read by this author I probably wouldn’t have requested it as I found the previous book, Before She Disappeared, quite far fetched in that someone could just step in and solve a cold case when a police force couldn’t.
We have the same character, Frankie Elkin, in this book and she once again is on a cold case. She becomes involved in a hunting expedition to look for a young man who disappeared some 5 years ago when he wandered off from his campsite in the search for his missing friend. The friend eventually returned, Tim didn’t. Every year on the anniversary of when he went missing, his father Martin and his 4 friends from that fateful camping trip ( it was his version of his stag do with his best men) trek into the wilds looking for his remains. This year Martin especially wants to bring his sons remains home as his wife is dying, and he has promised her he will find Tim.
There are 8 in the party in total, including a cadaver dog and her handler. It doesn’t take long for things to start going wrong, supplies ransacked, people injured and the feeling of being watched. Trouble escalates pretty quickly and it soon becomes apparent they are not alone and are are in serious danger, they must try to outwit the Hunter. With half of them injured and their supplies diminished, their chances of survival lessen by the hour.
This was a real page turner and quite creepy in parts. As the author is a hiker, the setting and descriptions of their trek through the rough terrain were very authentic .
I would probably read the next instalment of Frankie Elkin.

#OneStepTooFar #NetGalley

Frankie finds people, not as a PI, but as a service to their families, to lay ghosts to rest. She hears about a dying mother whose son has gone missing during a mountain hike. Five years have passed. Frankie is not a hiker or a camper, but tags onto the search party. The father and friends are joined by a mountain guide, a search dog & handler and a big foot hunter.
Frankie learns a lot about the great outdoors in a short space of time. She is also pushed to her max physically. She is good at hearing other peoples stories and little by little the events of 5 years ago are revealed and she pieces the crimes together.
The camp and hikes become dangerous as it becomes obvious that someone does not want the search party to search any longer. Frankie makes a macabre discovery and the suspense builds up as different group members quit or are attacked. The pace of the story picks up as the book progresses. Frankie also has her own demons, but does not reveal too much about these.
I enjoyed the read and could not put it down towards the end . Frankie, as a character, grew on me though I find myself questioning some of her decisions. I do want to hear more about her.
Thank you to Net Galley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review

"The first three men came stumbling into town after 10am babbling of dark shapes and eerie screams and their missing buddy Scott."

One Step Too Far had me hooked from the opening line. With the disappearance of a young man in the woods having gone cold by local law enforcement, the father refuses to give up and assembles a search party. Frankie Elkin, whom we met on Before She Disappeared, agrees to help in the search after a crew member requires medical care. No stranger to cold cases, Frankie soon finds there is more to this than a simple search and rescue for a missing man. The father is under threat and the the track becomes more arduous as someone tries to sabotage the search. Tensions boil amongst the trekkers as the expedition becomes increasingly more difficult. The truth about the mans disappearance is not so simple. Francie finds herself embroiled in a race against time and darker forces. A gripping read. #onesteptoofar #lisagardner #Netgalley

This is the second book in the Frankie Elkin series. Frankie’ some job is to find missing dead people after there cases have gone cold. This time she is looking for a man who had disappeared five years earlier. She has joined a yearly search crew after one of the original eight crew members needs medical attention on the eve of the latest search.

The man had gone missing whilst camping with four of his college friends in a national forest. Frankie is now on the search with three of the friends, the man’s father, a wilderness expert who knows the area well, a search and rescue member with her cadaver dog Daisy, and a Bigfoot hunter.

The father and wilderness expert aren’t very friendly towards Frankie and the other searchers. The three friends are not happy to be giving up another week in the wilderness looking for their missing friend, do they even like each other anymore? Seems to be a bit of a mix of anger and guilt. The father has been getting threatening messages trying to get him to give up the yearly searches,, but he is not giving up anything until he finds his son.

It’s a tough hike to the base camp. But then things start happening that makes it clear that someone is out to sabotage the search. There are a number of characters in the book that need to be juggled, but Lisa Gardner manages this well, initially I wasn’t keen on the three friends but gradually as Frankie gets to know each of them you get to realise the emotions they feel about the missing friend, you find yourself rooting for them to survive. Having read book one in this series I enjoyed getting to know more about Frankie, seeing her grow. I can’t wait for the next book in the series.

This was an action and tension packed story. A group head into the Wilderness to find a friend/son who has been missing after a weekend tri[p five years previously. Very blood thirsty in parts and lots of twists and turn. A typical Lisa Gardener thriller. with a satisfying conclusion..

Frankie Elkin is the latest in a line-up of unreliable female narrators with no apparent family ties who are recovering alcoholics, a line-up that also includes The Girl on the Train’s Rachel and The Woman at the Window’s Anna. Unlike the others, though, Gardner’s protagonist Franke Elkin is not inadvertently drawn into a mystery but actively searches out cold cases and attempts to find the bodies of those who have been missing for a long time. Frankie travels to the national parks of Wyoming to join the search party for Tim O’Day, who went missing on his bachelor party in the woods five years earlier. Frankie and her cadaver dog Daisy are joined on this mission by Tim’s grieving father, three of his former college friends, a game hunter and a search and rescue specialist. Hiking through the dense terrain to the base camp and camping in plunging temperatures test Frankie’s endurance to its limits, and when Tim’s father starts to receive threatening messages, it soon becomes clear that someone, somewhere, will go to great lengths to sabotage their mission...
I was already part-way through this tense thriller, set against a bleak context of imposing wilderness, when I realised that One Step Too Far is actually the second instalment of a Frankie Elkin series. No matter, as the novel makes a perfect stand-alone thriller, too. Gardner is an accomplished writer who manages to write not only a spellbinding plot but also to illuminate a complex, vulnerable yet determined character who finds themselves at a crossroads. I highly recommend A Step Too Far and would like to thank the publishers, as well as NetGalley, for the free ARC that made my book review possible.

Thank you NetGalley for this advanced copy. I miss DD Warren, so I hope this new series isn't going to take over for DD. This book was good, but the first book in the series was better. There were parts of this book that I felt were just downright disturbing, but the flow as good, and it kept my attention. Good ending with a shocking twist as to who the killer was.

I was so happy to see another book following Frankie Elkin and her unorthodox methods of solving cold cases. This installment follows Frankie as she hikes to find Tim, a man who disappeared 5 years earlier on his bachelor weekend.

A brilliant cast of characters head out on the hike with her and as secrets and lies within the group begin to come out it seems very few of the people Frankie must rely are can be trusted.

I loved the direction this book took and did not expect the story to become the one it did. I was extremely saddened by the end but the book was amazing overall.

I hope there is a third book in this series.

I didn't hate One Step Too Far, but I'm very glad it's over.

I didn't enjoy Frankie's character at all. I found her to be hypocritical, entitled and very pushy. She forced her way into the hiking group and acted like every member owed her completely transparent answers to her very personal questions, while never divulging anything about herself to them.

It became silly that it was always Frankie who discovered all the relevant clues and basically carried this team of experienced hikers, when in reality she'd have been the first one dead.

A few of the things about the plot that didn't make sense to me are as follows:

-Such a big deal was made about Bob being a paid private investigator rather than a bigfoot enthusiast (I didn't understand why it mattered either way) and then it was all forgotten about and never mentioned again.

-Another big deal was made out of Josh's motivation for packing such a huge knife. After a while, it was never explained or pondered upon again.

-The screams they kept hearing in the forest were apparently Marge who had presumably followed them an entire day's hike into the woods just to startle them into turning back? Which was completely pointless because Nemeth, Marge's partner in crime who should have built on their paranoia in order to get them all to turn around, was just like 'don't worry, it's an animal.' And no one noticed Marge being gone from her diner all that time.

-Why hadn't Devil's canyon ever been searched before? If it was so far off-course that it was highly unlikely Tim would have ever made it there, how did he make it there? And why did it take 5 years for someone to consider having a look there? A geologist went missing there because she wanted to explore the underground chambers. Why then, wasn't SAR dispatched there to explore the underground chambers and recover her body? And if they didn't know that she went there to explore the underground chambers, how did Frankie know that's what she was doing, at the end???

-Why mummify a body that you want to dispose of in a national forest, rather than either burying it or throwing it into one of the vast lakes that the town authorities wouldn't have the budget to drag, so it can decompose and by the time it's ever found, any sign of the cause of death will be long destroyed and it will just look like the person got lost and died of natural causes?
Why deliberately mummify the body so you're then forced to murder every single person afterwards who might potentially discover it? If the killers had used the slightest bit of common sense, the book couldn't have happened.

-Frankie says the first kill is always the most personal, and she discovers the killer by tracing the first disappearance and linking her to her sister, Marge. This indicates that the first person to ever disappear in the vast wilderness of the national forest and not be found, is someone who disappeared in living memory. Otherwise, Frankie would have no idea how to sort the true missing from those who have been murdered, and it would take a lot more than a simple 20 minute online search to find out who the first missing person was and connect it to Marge. So I'm supposed to believe that no one ever disappeared there prior to Marge's sister going missing, in the hundreds of years that town has been established.
Frankie had to have an extremely convenient starting point from which to pinpoint Marge as the murderer of the 'first' disappeared person. But the book starts off talking about the huge number of people who go missing in national parks and forests every year. Except that one in Wyoming, apparently.

-Nemeth and Marge never had to kill Tim in the first place. They suspected he might have been in Devil's Canyon because he hadn't been found in the first few weeks of the search, and so they went out there to find him and stop him from finding and exposing their underground chamber of dead bodies.
Tim's letter he'd been writing the whole time he was lost showed no indication that he'd found said chamber, so instead of murdering him, Nemeth and Marge could have easily just brought him home. No one would have had any need to go to Devil's Canyon and discover the chamber if they'd just brought him out alive. And they'd have been seen as heroes.

-Again, if it was such a big deal that 8 or 9 whole people had disappeared in the same area in the past few years, why was Devil's Canyon never searched?!

In order for Frankie to advance the plot, her actions were often disrespectful, unprofessional and downright reckless:

For her to find the fake cadaver scent sticks, she had to decide to wash all the bloody clothes that were inside all the hikers' packs, even though they were all evidence in an open murder investigation.

She kept the snacks that Josh put in the pack she borrowed, inside the tent with her knowing it could attract a bear and have all the hikers killed.

She lowered herself down into a cave with an 8 foot drop, without knowing that there was any way of getting back out, and knowing her fellow hikers had no clue where she was.

She ripped out Nemeth's IV and was probably responsible for his resulting heart attack, but no charges were brought against her because the 'good' guy always gets away with breaking the law in Justice Land.

She broke into Marge's cabin on the flimsy theory that Marge killed her sister, though she had no evidence of it prior to breaking into the cabin and finding all the packs of the missing hikers.

-Why would Marge leave the murdered hikers' packs on display for anyone who stumbled upon the cabin to find? Frankie asserts that they did it because they were trophies, but then it's insinuated that Marge killed her sister out of frustration, and the rest of the hikers were killed out of necessity, not because they enjoyed killing people, so why would they then take trophies of their kills?

-How did Nemeth know about every single hiker that passed through Devil's Canyon in order for him to catch up with them and kill them before they discovered the mummified bodies? Yes, there's a log of hikers' planned routes that they have to report to the authorities before they leave, but this doesn't account for people who get lost and end up in Devil's Canyon, or people who decide to go off trail because they're experienced. Did Nemeth permanently live out in Devil's Canyon to stop the bodies being discovered? If not, then how had they not been discovered by SAR dogs yet?

-If Nemeth had been using the fake cadaver scent sticks to confuse Daisy and lead her away from the chamber, why did Daisy never walk up to one of the scent sticks and demonstrate that she'd found the source of the smell, like she did to the one in Nemeth's hospital bed? She should have easily been able to track the scent sticks and alert Luciana to at least one of them, who would have found them and known what they were, and realised that one of the hiking group was trying to throw everyone off. A search of all the packs would have ensued, Nemeth's pack would have been found to contain the scent sticks and the book could have put me out of my misery and ended a lot sooner.

-When Nemeth killed Tim, why did he leave behind 5-year-old evidence of Tim having been at Devil's Canyon that he must have known Martin was about to find when they went there to search for him? The discovery of the stone fire pits would have concentrated the search on Devil's Canyon and could have been avoided by simply kicking the stones out of formation in the cave prior to the hikers' arrival.

-The ending was a huge deus ex machina. Martin, who had been shot over and over again at close range, somehow followed everyone down the mountain without being noticed by Nemeth, and not only managed to sneak up on them miles and miles away from where he was shot, but also had the strength to dive onto Nemeth and keep standing up after being stabbed in the chest multiple times, and then drag Nemeth over the ridge with him. The whole scenario was embarrassingly ridiculous. The author didn't want Miguel to save everyone with his handgun because "guns are bad," so she had deader than dead Martin inexplicably survive and march down the mountain to save them instead. Also, if Nemeth was so close to the edge of the ridge, why didn't Frankie just push him off herself? Sure, she had a dislocated shoulder and a sprained ankle, but Martin had been shot about 95 times and stabbed in the chest an almost equal amount, and it was reasonable for him to still have the strength?

-Nemeth managed to climb up out of the ravine that should have killed him and make his way to a river where he collapsed almost dead, without leaving any tracks leading back to the ravine, which would have made it obvious he was the one who Martin dragged over the edge with him. He also managed to dispose of his camo gear along the way while he was on the verge of bleeding to death. Also, police don't think to connect Frankie's story about Miguel shooting the hunter in the arm, with the bullet wound in Nemeth's arm...

Aside from all that, I didn't like the prose much, as I found it repetitive and quite pretentious. I had to care about Frankie in order to enjoy reading her flowery, self-congratulatory inner monologue and I didn't, so I skipped most of it. I also had to skip most of the detail used to minutely describe every single movement the hikers made in the forest because it wasn't interesting.
The only thing I really loved about the story was Daisy.

Overall, the book started off strong with the potential for some juicy bigfoot action, but devolved into a slow, overwrought drama featuring an unbelievable heroine that I wanted to slap, and ended up as a delusional happily ever after, where guns are bad (and only ever cause destruction and are useless in self-defence) and the biggest, strongest man died leaving the weakest, puniest, least experienced female hiker to survive, save the day, AND singlehandedly bring the killers to justice.

3* is pretty generous.

Five buddies went camping in a national forest as a bachelor party, four return. The groom went missing and five years later, not a single sign of the missing person has ever been found, not even a back pack!

Frankie Elkin looks for missing person cold cases. She is a recovering alcoholic, has no family, no roots and no job. She travels from place to place looking for missing people for no reward. She often does bar work to tide her over financially once she gets to a new location.
She joins a search party on the eve of an annual search. Not exactly welcomed but due to a search party member dropping out due to illness, she is reluctantly accepted.
The party consists of three of the remaining buddies, the missing man's father, a man with an interest in Bigfoot, Luciana and her cadaver dog Daisy.
Frankie soon begins to wander if she's taken on too much. Trekking in the wilderness is tough but it does give Frankie the opportunity to talk to everyone and get them to open up as to what might have happened. Then strange things to start to happen, their food goes missing and one person gets mysteriously injured and that's just on the first night!
It soon becomes apparent that someone or something doesn't want them there, almost as if they are being hunted.
This is the second book in the Frankie Elkin series but can be read as a stand alone.
This is the first book I have read of Lisa Gardner, having thought that I recognised her name as an author that I had already read. I was a little apprehensive of reading this as I tend to lean to British authors for no other reason than I find the nature of the characters or the location relatable. However, I really enjoyed this thriller and would definitely read another Frankie Elkin or any book by Lisa Gardener.

This was a great read and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was a great adventure story which goes horribly wrong.
The quest to find a missing member of the friendship group turns into a nightmare.
Very well written with great characters.

This review will be posted with Waterstones

I haven’t ever read anything by this author before but I am glad I have now read this. It went in a different way than I was expecting but I love that about books. Sometimes when you read a lot of books they become easy to predict and I liked that this one kept you guessing!

I really enjoyed this book from the start. Set in the woods, searching for a missing man, what happens next? The character Frankie was well rounded and interesting. It was scary and exciting, a fast paced story that just kept me wanting to read more. I loved the twists and turns throughout.

I didn't realise that this was a second book in the series. It read OK as a standalone but had quite a bit of back story in it.

Thank you to Netgalley and Random House UK for an ARC in exchange for an honest opinion

I was gripped from the start of this book, loved the twists and turns throughout, Frankie is a great character