A well written tense thriller, two women, more alike than they know play a cat and mouse game. Lots of eithical questions to discuss. The author, manages to make both women sympathetic, even though one is an ethical contract killer. Highly recommend but for older students

This was my second read from Heather. I found the structure quite similar to the last hook I read. The book did keep me interested throughout and finished in just a couple days. Thanks for the ARC!

Thanks to Netgalley and Mullholland Books for providing this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Single mom, Julia is dropping her daughter, Cora, at college and having an awkward time with her ex husband Eric and his new wife Bree when there is a sniper shooting. Bree is killed and Cora is hit by a stray bullet. Julia is terrified that Cora may have been targeted but can’t figure out why.

This was told from alternating points of view, Julia and Ren, a hired assassin who only kills people who deserve it. Ren knows her husband was behind the sniper shooting but is angry because he didn’t discuss it with her ahead of time and possibly hit the wrong person. I mostly liked this book. It held my attention and I read it in a couple of days. I thought Ren was a little over the top and I also am aware she is pregnant and don’t need to be reminded on every page! Anyway, I still think No Bad Deeds was her best but this one wasn’t bad. Will read more.

I received this book as an ARC from NetGalley. I have to say this was my first Heather Chavez book but if will not be my last. From the first page I was pulled into this suspenseful story with so many possibilities. It kept me guessing who was the real villain and sometimes those lines were blurry.

This was the first book I've read by Chavez and now I'm requesting all of the others she has written! What an interesting story about a mom and her college freshman daughter. I loved the slow burn and mystery that follows when she drops her off to move-in day at school. I was invested in the plot and wanted to know what was going to happen to these two!

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC for the purpose of this review. 5 stars!

Generally, a book with a mass shooting in it is a hard no from me, but here, in many ways the shooting is only the catalyst to the rest of the plot, and it didn’t bother me as much.

During my reading, I had a difficult time putting this down. Told in two parts, the story flows and both storylines move along easily - this kept my attention the entire time. So why am I rating this with three stars then? I personally found the ending to be anticlimactic, with too much implausibility.

I’ll close my review by writing that this was my first book by the author but it won’t be the last. My issues with this one aside, it kept me interested and turning the pages.




Thank you to Mulholland Books and NetGalley for the DRC!

I really enjoyed this one! Another shooting at a college campus on move in day. But one mother's immediate reaction is noted and that has caught the attention of others. Julia Bennett recognized the sounds as gunshots before anyone else even had time to react. She immediately pulled her daughter to safety. But others around her were not so fortunate. Julia, with secrets of her own, starts to wonder if the victims weren't as random as first thought.
Ren Pretrovic has her own reasons for looking into the shooting. A career assassin, her and her family's life may now be in jeopardy. What did her partner, Nolan know about the shooting? If he was involved, why didn't he include her?
Told from the two women's point of view, this was an exciting thriller that had me guessing until the end.
Thank you NetGalley and Mulholland Books for my gifted arc.

I am pretty shocked I didn't like this one more. Obviously it's just my personal feelings, because this book has wonderful reviews. I just did not like the characters and the plot was pretty predictable.

This latest book by Heather Chavez is mind blowing and action packed. It starts with kids moving into college and a horrific shooting takes place. Is it random? Is it a sniper from afar? We follow these people throughout and I wasn’t sure what was going to happen next. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this early release in exchange for my honest review. I’m still thinking about this one …

Heather Chavez just keeps getting better and better! This is her best novel yet!

This is original, thrilling, and kept my attention the entire way through. Can't believe I was lucky enough to read this early.

Heather Chavez's third novel is much better than her second one LOL. "Before She Finds Me" was a great thriller mystery.

Thank you to the publisher for the free ARC (advanced reader copy) of this super fun thriller! This book had a great hook to bring the reader in. The dual perspectives added a lot to the story with how different they were. Unexpectedly, I found both perspectives sympathetic despite their differences. After the shocking inciting incident, it’s a slow burn toward the end. There were lots of twists that unfolded well the further I read, and I loved that nothing ever seemed obvious. It kept me guessing. Loved reading this one!

3.5 stars

OUTLIER ALERT!! I’m definitely in the minority here, so please check out other reviews as well. But I just didn’t connect with this one. I guessed the twist early on and actively disliked one of the main characters. I’m going to chalk this up to: It’s not the book; it’s me. With that said, I liked it. It was an enjoyable read. I just didn’t love it. But you might!! So many reviewers are giving it rave reviews. If you read it, let me know your thoughts please.

My thanks to @mulhollandbooks and @netgalley for the opportunity to read and review this book before its publication date.

When a divorced Botany professor with a traumatic past attends her daughter's move-in day at college with her ex and his new wife, a sniper interrupts the proceedings and, thanks to her quick thinking, she's able to shield her daughter, who is wounded but not killed - unlike the ex's new wife and another bystander. Clearly the shooting wasn't random - and she can't help but try to find out what happened. In alternate chapters, we meet a principled assassin whose husband was responsible for the shooting, hired by a rich man - and who apparently didn't kill the right person, so is in big trouble. Ren, the assassin, who is a sort of botanist herself, with poison her preferred weapon, is pregnant and becomes suspicious of her husband, who not only was hasty and unprepared when he took the job but isn't adhering to her strict moral code, to only kill people who deserve it.

The writing is strong, the execution is sure-footed, and that and a couple of the characters' development, carried me to the end, even though the high-concept plot seemed both too clever and too preposterous. I'm also not fond of stories that depend on killers with a moral code who we're supposed to admire. Mixed feelings about this one. Three and half.

I loved the cover! If only the contents held up as well. The assassin character was so poorly written. The way they talked about and wrote about the baby was cringe-inducing. Every cliche in the book. I didn't care about anyone which is really key in a book like this. I was hope she would find them so it would end.

Well well well… starting the year off with some originality, thrill, and just a WIN! Despite having a reading hiatus for a minute - this one was a hard one to walk away from. Finally a completely engaging book that sucker punched you and made you question what the hell is going on all the way until the very end. Honestly I wanted even more in the end but that’s because I was so wrapped in the characters the selfish me NEEDED more.

Julia has a daughter named Cora with her ex husband. Off to college they go for her first year drop off and Eric brings along his new trophy wife Brie. Everything is going as well and awkward as expected until a shooting begins. Cora is hit but saved by Julia. On the other side of things there is Ren who is newly pregnant and married to Nolan and they both are assassins. Ren was taught by her dad so it’s a little family gig they got going on. She finds out Nolan was the shooter, and he is usually quite the marksman, but seems this job went wrong. Let the chaos commence!!!

You truly fall in love with Julia and her determination. Not the pushed and shoved down your throat garbage but the natural strength a woman can have. The sink or swim figure of speech and Julia is very much Michael Phelps. And yes, Ren is an assassin and killing people is not nice or whatever, but her ethics and code and mind were just brilliant and I kind of found myself rooting for her in a twisted way.

This is definitely one I’ll be recommending. It’s quick and easy and captivating right until the very end.

Thank you Mulholland Books and netgalley for the arc in exchange for my honest review.

4 stars

Thank you to both NetGalley and Mulholland Books for the eARC in exchange for an honest review!
Oof, this was such a joy to read that I finished it in less than 24 hours. There are two things that irk me about thrillers: the twists are predictable, or the ending is a cop-out. I felt that Before She Finds Me avoided this by having such complex women whose lives, morals, and careers juxtaposed them, and there were constant surprises throughout that showed how Chavez put such thought into this. I love when characters have secrets, and love when pieces are revealed to us slowly and sometimes implicitly.

Another thing Chavez did well was deciding to feature an alternating POV between Julia and Ren with such amazingly frustrating cliffhangers at the end of each chapter. Granted, that isn’t something unique to the thriller genre, but I felt that this novel did it especially well. The overlapping discoveries revealed to the women was also done in a way that honoured the “show don’t tell” rule, which is something very important to me (and another reason why I refuse to read any more Ken Follett – and, on that note, I had a chuckle the reference to Dan Brown @ 26%, especially if it’s a sly dig). But, not gonna lie, when I was introduced to four characters in the initial two paragraphs of the novel, I was confused as hell and spent some time (probably an embarrassing amount of time) reading those two paragraphs to memorize the characters’ relationships with one another.

Sounds great so far, right? Well, it mostly is, if not for my own moral compass that appears to conflict with the author’s – at least, in some ways. I noticed that both Ren and Julia had very extreme reactions to mentions of infidelity throughout, where it was occasionally used as a justification for killing them. While I understand that both characters had negative experiences with cheating (as I’m sure most people who are monogamous have these feelings toward cheating), I felt that the two women’s reactions were overly intense.

Another reason I’m refraining from giving this book 5 stars is how it reinforces stigma about people who use substances and, I think that, given that we are currently living in an opioid epidemic (and out here, in British Columbia, there are none of us who haven’t been personally impacted by it), it is important to note that the way this book frames people who use substances contributes to the stigma, rather than alleviating it, which is not something I take lightly.

That aside, this was an enjoyable read, and I would recommend this to anyone who likes a good twist, enjoys reading about plants, and loves a good debate about ethics.

I was looking forward to this one. I got about 50 pages in and it didn’t hold me. Hired killers though are not my thing I had hoped to love this one.

Thank you Mulholland books & Netgalley for an eARC of Before She Finds Me by Heather Chavez in exchange for an honest review. Chavez is one of my favorite authors, her book being No Bad Deed an all-time favorite of mine, so as soon as I saw this one available as a galley I RAN (and maybe tripped) to hit request.

What’s it about?
Julia Bennett is moving her daughter Cora in for college with her ex-husband and his new wife. The last thing Julia expects is an attack on campus, but her quick actions save her daughter’s life. Julia’s not only shaken by what happened but is harboring secrets frothier past. Was the attack random? She isn’t so sure it was.

The novel also follows Ren Petrovic. Not only is she a trained assassin, but she’s pregnant. She wasn’t on campus the day of the attack, but her husband was. She doesn’t know why he didn’t involve her sooner…he broke their rules, and she begins to question who hired him, and how was Julia able to act so quickly?

Wow! Very rarely do I get triggered by a book, and I am constantly reading novels that many consider dark and twisted. Chavez writes the school shooting scene so expertly that while reading, I felt like I was there with the characters. Absolute chills. Julia and Ren, a current and soon-to-be mother, both want to uncover the truth behind the attack on campus. It quickly becomes apparent that the truth will destroy one of their families - And both are determined to keep theirs in tact. Dual POVs that are both beautifully written, details come full circle in this one to send you on a roller-coaster ride of emotions that will have you rooting for both strong female leads (even though they aren't necessarily on the same side). Chavez, job well done on another novel that will stay with me forever.

I love this intense, climactic thriller. I was incredibly invested in the characters and plot. Readers are going to love this incredible novel.