Rating - ⭐⭐
"People don’t just disappear without a trace....
Shelby Tebow is the first to go missing. Not long after, Meredith Dickey and her six-year-old daughter, Delilah, vanish just blocks away from where Shelby was last seen, striking fear into their once-peaceful community. Are these incidents connected? After an elusive search that yields more questions than answers, the case eventually goes cold.
Now, 11 years later, Delilah shockingly returns. Everyone wants to know what happened to her, but no one is prepared for what they’ll find..."
Local Woman Missing is a standalone mystery thriller novel by Mary Kubica.
I was originally listening to this on audio but ended up switching to the ebook because I just wanted to finish this book...which pretty much says everything. This book just made me mad, partly because the characters were just horrible people, and partly because the story took a wrong turn for me.
Let's get into the details.
WRITING/NARRATING
I wasn't the biggest fan of the narration, but it was okay enough to keep me going for a while. This story goes back and forth between the current time and 11 years ago and switched between several different perspectives. The use of a dual-timeline was fine since it made sense for the grand scheme of the story, but I am not entirely convinced that the multi-pov was worth it.
PLOT
This initially had some promise, as the way the story started was rather interesting. However, the story got bigger than it should have and got away from itself, even if everything ended up (mostly) lining up, albeit taking a very long time to do so. Still, though, there were too many plotlines to the point where it made the story a bit convoluted.
As I said in the introduction, this book made me mad, and here is one of the reasons why. For some context, one of the characters, Meredith, is a doula, which is a trained companion who helps people through their pregnancy. Through this plotline, the reader is exposed to medical malpractice and the general mistreatment of female patients which, as a woman, drove me nuts. This absolutely ground my gears to read about because you know that, sadly, this is a common occurrence.
Moving on, the reveal was disappointing, to say the least. I didn't like the direction the author chose to go in, but that is subjective. It just felt a little left-field for me and it brought my satisfaction of the reveal, and the story as a whole, way down.
CHARACTERS
I felt apathy towards all of the characters except one, who I just didn't like. I didn't feel invested in any of the stories, except for Delilah's in the beginning before her development stopped dead. The thorn in my side in this book was Leo.
Leo is Delilah's younger brother, who had to grow up not really remembering his sister. He is put into an odd situation, but he does not have one single ounce of sympathy for what Delilah went through. It was really frustrating getting the story through his eyes because of this, and I could have done without his perspective.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
This just didn't deliver the story I wanted nor expected. It had a great start but then dropped off from there as the story started to get a bit ahead of itself.
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