Breakaway Books

Authored by Stella Sands; Published August 2024; Mystery

⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️

Wordhunter makes Florida come off *really* badly. The author must be holding quite the grudge to make it the scene of so much pain and misery.

Wordhunter follows Maggie Moore as she juggles finishing her graduate degree in forensic linguistics, assisting the police with language clues left in anonymous notes, and scraping together enough money to survive by working an inordinate number of shifts at a diner. Still haunted by the disappearance of her childhood best friend, Maggie is determined to use her gifts with language to make the world safer. Her initial foray into police work is wildly successful, but the high-profile kidnapping of a local mayor’s daughter throws her for a loop. Is there anything she can do to prevent a repeat of her best friend’s disappearance?

Maggie is not the heroine that we can all look up to. She’s moody, she drinks all the time, she uses abundant foul language, and she is completely impetuous. But, she is certainly a genius of sorts—encyclopedic knowledge of all things related to the English language rolls off her tongue. I can’t say she is my favorite character to spend time with; she is just a little too harsh for me, even if I share her love of language. In fact, none of Wordhunter’s characters are what I would call pleasant, and her professor, an unquestionable villain in this story, was so one-dimensionally evil as to strain credulity. He seems to exist merely to put an obstacle in Maggie’s way and give her a challenge to overcome to become the heroine she is meant to be.

As for the mystery itself, I admit I was wondering just how dumbed down the forensic linguistic clues were that Maggie finds in service of the general reader. Am I perhaps overly familiar with American regionalisms? Sure, but I also think of them as pretty obvious clues to the identity of their writer. Surely forensic linguists have much more sophisticated tools at their disposal than awareness of the different words we call sandwiches (hoagies, subs, grinders, etc.). To me, the ultimate villain became obvious fairly early on in the story, but it didn’t deter me from enjoying the plot as it unfolded. Considering the nature of the crimes described, this is not a novel to pick up if you are particularly disturbed by young women being held captive for long periods of time, or if your nightmare is being trapped in a cult. All of it seems to be extremely common in the great state of Florida. 

Wordhunter is a good niche mystery for the language nerds among us. But if geeking out over sentence diagramming and sub-dialects isn’t your thing, you can give it a pass.