In Local Woman Missing, Mary Kubica (When the Lights Go Out; The Other Mrs.) moves around in time and perspective to create a kaleidoscopic view of the disappearance of a young mother, and then of another woman and her young daughter, rocking the quiet suburb in which they all lived.
The first woman to vanish is Shelby Tebow, new mother unhappily married to an unfaithful husband. Weeks later, Meredith Dickey and her six-year-old daughter, Delilah, are gone, too, without a trace. It's unclear to all--families, neighbors, police, readers--if these disappearances are related, though they feel too close to be coincidence. And when the bodies of both women are found and identified, the questions shift: Who would want these women dead, and what happened to Delilah? When a teenage Delilah shows up out of nowhere 11 years later, covered in dirt and with no memory of her life before her kidnapping, the questions only multiply, sucking in everyone in the orbit of both families.
There are a lot of threads in Local Woman Missing, which may make the novel difficult to follow, but also the best of the whodunit variety: red herrings and false leads abound, leaving readers guessing to the very end about how these threads connect to one another, despite an absolute certainty that they do. As they do, Kubica further owns her role as a master of domestic suspense, weaving a dark mystery that reveals just how far some people will go to keep a secret--no matter the cost. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm