BY Mary Kubica RELEASE DATE: may 18, 2021
I’m hooked on psychological thrillers. Give me Sheri Lapena, Riley Sager, Tana French in the
morning and I’ll finish the book that night. But my favorite is Mary Kubica. The master of the plot twist has done it again with her new release, Local Woman Missing.
Kubica’s style caught my attention through audiobooks. Her first person-present tense point of view is perfect for the audio medium. Put your headphones on and your three-mile jog will turn into a marathon. I’ve read half her books on audio. But the other half had me flipping traditional (well, ebook) pages faster than an audiobook on 1.5x speed.
Long-time Kubica fans will find the structure of her seventh novel familiar. There’s an inciting incident and then she intricately weaves the story between ‘before’ chapters and ‘after’ chapters. This book centers on (surprise) a missing woman. But not just one. Days after the first disappearance, a mother and her daughter also go missing.
Then—eleven years later—the daughter, Delilah, returns. What happened the day she disappeared? Where is her mother? And the first missing woman? As her brother, Leo observes,
“To be straight, I never thought they were going to find you. I gave that up a long time ago. In all honesty I kind of wish they hadn’t ‘cause Dad and I were getting along just fine without you.”
It’s a wild ride, and in traditional Kubica fashion, she not only twists the plot in unpredictable directions, she turns it as well, forcing the reader to reconsider their original assumptions.
If you find yourself just as enamored with these psychological thrillers as I am, then try Riley Sager’s Lock Every Door or AJ Finn’s Woman in the Window. Both these authors can turn a straight-forward plot on end and keep you guessing until the last page.
Overall, a 5 out of 5 stars review. A few naysayers out there claim Mary Kubica is formulaic and predictable. I don’t know—maybe she is, but it’s interesting to note that in order to label her in that fashion you have to read all her work. I bet those critics flipped through every last page… just as quickly as I did.