Nearly Found

Overview

Elle Cosimano's Nearly Found picks up the story of Nearly Boswell, a teenager still living down the notoriety of the con-man father who disappeared five years earlier and the serial-killer case she helped close the previous spring. She takes a crime-lab internship hoping for nothing more dramatic than a strong line on a college application and a way out of the Sunny View trailer park she calls home.

Her first day upends that plan. A girl from her own trailer park is found dead, a figure from Nearly's past calls in an old debt that threatens everything she's working toward, and investigators unearth a body on a local golf course with a cryptic message etched into its bones — addressed, unmistakably, to her. The discovery forces an agonizing question: is the body her missing father, and if so, was he killed, or did he kill?

As further crimes echo the same eerie signature, Nearly finds her fear dismissed by friends who think she's overreacting, while her boyfriend Reece is distracted by his own undercover work for the police. Increasingly certain she can trust no one else, Nearly is left to chase the truth about her father and a killer largely on her own.

A Series Rooted in Class and Suspicion

As a sequel, Nearly Found extends the concerns of Cosimano's earlier book rather than starting fresh: it keeps its protagonist tethered to the trailer park she is trying to escape and to a family history that makes her an object of suspicion in her own town. Nearly's effort to build a legitimate future in forensics is constantly undercut by people who assume her father's dishonesty runs in the blood, and the novel uses that tension to ask how much a person can outrun where they came from.

The book also leans into the mechanics of the crime-thriller genre — forensic detail, a puzzle-box killer who communicates through physical evidence, and a mystery that implicates the protagonist's own family — while keeping its focus on Nearly's isolation. Allies who once helped her, including Reece, are pulled away by their own entanglements, and the story repeatedly strips away the people she might lean on, leaving her to weigh how much of her plan she is willing to risk to learn the truth.

Why Nearly Found Has Been Challenged

Disagreements over Nearly Found have often centered less on whether the book has literary merit than on where it belongs on a shelf — whether a story this dark in subject matter is suited to the younger end of the young-adult audience or to middle-grade collections it might otherwise be shelved alongside. The objections that follow from that concern focus on the book's sustained crime and violence content: a narrative built around multiple deaths, an exhumed corpse, and a killer who leaves deliberately gruesome, taunting messages carved into human remains.

Additional concerns raised by challengers point to the novel's portrayal of a teenage protagonist operating largely without adult protection or oversight as she pursues a dangerous investigation, as well as to the presence of a romantic relationship and related content some reviewers consider too mature for younger readers. Records reviewed for this catalog show the book has drawn a challenge in 1 state and 2 school districts, reflecting a narrower but persistent objection to its violent imagery and thriller-genre content rather than broad rejection of the work.