Nearly Boswell Books in Order

The Nearly Boswell books are YA thrillers with a sharp mystery puzzle at the center and a heroine who has good reason not to trust anyone. Nearly lives in a trailer park outside Washington, DC, and she works hard to keep the parts of her life that classmates might use against her hidden. She is smart, observant, and used to staying on guard. She also has an unusual ability: when she touches someone, she can taste emotions on their skin.

That strange gift is not treated like a superhero trick. It is one more thing Nearly has to manage while trying to survive high school, money stress, class judgment, and the constant feeling that other people know more than they are saying. In Nearly Gone, a serial killer starts targeting students and leaving cryptic newspaper clues that Nearly seems uniquely able to decode. That turns the series into a mix of code-breaking mystery, psychological suspense, and reluctant teamwork, especially once Reece, the new boy with secrets of his own, enters the picture.

These books are mysteries first, but the pressure always feels personal.

The second novel, Nearly Found, broadens the story without losing that tight sense of danger. Nearly lands an internship at a crime lab, expecting something good for her future, and instead gets pulled into another murder investigation when a girl from her trailer park is killed and a body is uncovered with a message for her. The case reaches back into the past, especially into the missing fathers and buried histories surrounding Nearly and the boys around her. What links the two books is not just crime, but the way old secrets shape the people still living with them.

Cosimano keeps the setting grounded. The DC area matters, and so do the trailer park, the school, the labs, the newspaper ads, and the uneasy line between the worlds Nearly moves through. There is romance here, but it never overwhelms the suspense. The bigger draw is the way Nearly thinks: she notices patterns, tests clues, and keeps going even when fear, shame, or grief would be easier places to stop.

Expect a darker tone than the Finlay Donovan books. The Nearly Boswell series is tense, intimate, and sometimes genuinely unsettling, but it is also very readable, because Nearly is such a clear, stubborn point of view. If you want the full arc, start with Nearly Gone and then read Nearly Found. The two books work best together, with the first building the immediate danger and the second digging deeper into the past that danger came from.