Local Woman Missing by Mary Kubica. Fantastic thriller.

Synopsis

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….

In this smart and chilling thriller, master of suspense and New York Times best-selling author Mary Kubica takes domestic secrets to a whole new level, showing that some people will stop at nothing to keep the truth buried.

Audiobook review

6 stars

What a way to begin 2023!

First book from that author but certainly not my last!

As this is a thriller/mystery, I will purposefully stay vague and relatively short in my review as not to spoil anything for you.

Local Woman Missing centers around the disappearance of two women and one little girl. That happened eleven years ago and we will weave between past and present throughout the story.

Told from different point of view the storyarc is diabolical and it truly was like Russian dolls: secrets within secrets within secrets, revelation within revelation. Until the very last pages and the shocking final!

We see the story unfurl through the eyes of:

Shelby Tebow. Her narrative plunges us eleven years ago and is just for one chapter.

Delilah, present tense, the vanished little girl who will reappear eleven years later. She has only one or two chapters at the beginning but they are CHILLING and very hard to read, be warned.

Meredith, past tense, eleven years before. Meredith is a doula and the second woman to go missing. Throughout the story, chapter after chapters, we’ll follow the months prior her disappearance till the shocking truth is revealed. And I never saw it coming!

Leo, Meredith’s son. His voice is in the present and he acts like an external narrator, recounting what happens after Delilah is found. He also acts like a bridge as he tells what his father went through all these years.

And finally, the last narrator is Kate, Meredith’s neighbor who helped look for her and Delilah all these years.

Step by step, the scene is set and the pawns move on this chess game. Marie Kubica led me on a goose chase, rushing through the book as the tension was mounting and I just HAD to know what happened. I’ll just say that I never guessed the truth and even when it unfold, at the end of the book, we had another blow waiting for us. We had secrets inside secrets, twists upon twists.

This is an extremely smart and well crafted “who did it” story.

I listened to the audio and we have a full cast. All narrators were simply excellent, perfectly chosen for the role they played.

If you love thrillers and mysteries, don’t think further, just read it!

Thanks for reading.

Sophie