I'm going to go with a "it's me, not you" for this book. I found it slow, boring, and I didn't want to pick it up. I plowed through 54% and gave up without wanting to know the "who-dun-it," because honestly, I just didn't care. Although they might meet up in the end, Bea and Kate's story line did absolutely nothing for me except annoy me.

Thanks, NetGalley!

Local Woman Missing by Mary Kubica is a uniquely told mystery because it is told in reverse, but you still don't know all the facts making it very compelling. There are some big twist that will make you change your whole theory of what is going on. The writing was good with just enough description to let you visualize what is going on. The narrative is told at three different times by four different people in the story, at first this is a little dizzying, but then starts to fit in to place. The way the story is told makes it brilliant, if it was told the normal way it would still be good but they way it is told makes you question and doubt everything. This is my first Mary Kubica and I was blown away I have heard her name mentioned in mystery but didn't expect to be this blown away and frankly jealous that I did not think of this brilliant way to tell a story. The finale is heart ponding and the villain gets what they deserved. This book does have LGTBQ characters. There are trigger warnings of extreme child abuse that could ruin this book for some. I would like to thank Netgalley and Harlequin trade publishing for giving me an advanced reader's copy of Local Woman Missing. Local Woman Missing by Mary Kubica is published on may 18th 2021.

The Plot: A girl escapes people that have been torturing her for 11 years, the girl is famous of a sort for missing. The novel jumps back 11 years to the day of the missing girl, and we know she is not the only one missing the mom and another local woman are missing as well. Then the novel jumps back even further to 11 years and 3 months, where the mom receives a threatening text message saying I know what you did years ago, you will be punished.

What I Liked: The plot and the way it is told add so much tension. The past will change you perception of the future, it was really cool how that was done. I liked the psychological aspect to the book on the toll of reintroduction of a girl missing takes on her and the family, having Leo, the younger brother of the missing girl be the narrator was great as we get in his head. I did like there was a lesbian couple that no one batted an eye at and trusted there kids with. The finale was tense you already know who the villain now you want to find out if they get caught or they do more destructive things. I was very satisfied with the ending and the turn of events.

What I Disliked: There was one plot twist about a cheating husband, an accusation, then we find one girl had an affair I was bummed that it wasn't tied into the husband, and that the husband having an affair just went away in the story, I kind wanted to know if it was true, or the accuser was just paranoid. I liked having the perspective of Leo a young 14 year old, but he has some lines about love and sex that felt more like a 40 year old that has been through the ringer not a 14 year old virgin.

Recommendation: Read local Woman missing it is a really smart mystery, that takes the reader for a ride shows you all the suspects and slowly fill in the details of the past and the present. Be warned of the trigger warning for extreme child abuse and entrapment. If I had to compare the narrative style to another book I would say it was closest to The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins, as close as it is the two are very different and this book doesn't have a perspective that you can not trust.
I rated Local Woman Missing by Mary Kubica 5 out of 5 stars. I will definitely be reading more Mary Kubica in the future.

Wow! This was such a well paced novel. Every second was heart pounding and intense, and I felt the panic that the characters did. Every-time I put the book down to go about my day, I kept on thinking about it. The characters are well developed, and complex. Just overall a really wonderful thriller. A must read for Mary Kubica fans.

Thank you to Netgalley for an eARC copy of Local Woman Missing!

My new favorite book by this author!
Great suspense layered with plot twists, characters you can envision and care about, and a fast pace that made me look forward to picking this book up every night.
Told from a few POVs - Meredith, one of the main characters, her son, Leo, and next-door neighbor, Kate, and goes back and forth between the setup of the local women missing from eleven years earlier to present day (through Leo.) The story displays how easily one wrong move, one poor decision, one split second, can derail and spiral a person's life, along with everyone who loves them or relies on them.
I loved this quick read, and it moves to the top of my favorite book by Mary Kubica. Great book!
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me a copy of this page-turner.

Another winner from Mary! She always keeps me guessing and LOCAL WOMAN MISSING is no different. I Just loved it!

Another amazing book from Mary Kubica! A woman goes missing while out for a run and the husband becomes the prime suspect. Things get more complicated when a mother and her daughter vanish. Are these two events related? This is a fast paced thriller with great atmospheric writing. From the first chapter I was hooked with this one. The ending is so well done! I don’t want to give too much away because it’s a thriller. You definitely need to pick this one up!

There are a lot of twists and turns in this story of two missing women and a girl. My niggle is that the plot twist came out of nowhere, with no hints to back it up and provide the reader with that aha moment, so it didn't come across as credible as it might have. Kubica is great at representing the messy, ambivalent, guilt-ridden emotions of human nature. I definitely like her work. I just wish she had led up to her climax more ambiguously, so that her red herring didn't come across so clunky. I do recommend her for her storytelling talent. I was fortunate to receive a digital copy from the publisher Park Row through NetGalley.

People are disappearing without a trace in this small peaceful community. First it was Shelby Tebow. People assumed her husband, who was known to be abusive, may have killed her. But no one was ever charged.

Next to disappear was Meredith Dickey, a mid-wife, and her 6-year-old daughter, Delilah. No one has seen them again.

Now, 11 years later, Delilah returns .. covered in filth, blood, and emaciated. Where has she been all these years? Everyone wants to know .... but do they really?

What happened to Delilah? What happened to the adult women who also disappeared? Who would want these people to disappear, never to be seen again. Somebody knows ... but they aren't talking.

From the very first page, the suspense is a throat-grabber and maintains a high level of suspense, tension,  apprehensiveness throughout. The well-titled chapters alternate from today and then from 11 years ago. The voices speaking are many ... while some remain silent ... It's a clever plot with intriguing characters .. all leading to a totally unexpected conclusion.

Many thanks to the author / Parkrow Books / Harlequin Books / Netgalley for the digital copy of this Psychological Thriller. Read and reviewed voluntarily, opinions expressed here are unbiased and entirely my own.

I really wanted to love this book. there was certainly enough in here to keep me turning page after page. A missing woman who turns up dead and a missing mother and daughter, the latter of which turns up alive 11 years later having lived through hell in a blacked out basement.

Told from a variety of perspectives both in the past and the present, the truth about what really happens to Shelby Trebow as well as Meredith and Delilah Dickey join together in an unexpected twist. Although the ending ties together in a pretty bow, something about it feels a little unsatisfactory. Which is kind of my overarching feeling about the book as a whole. Local Woman Missing is no doubt was well written and had enough content to keep the pace ticking over, but it just didn't get there quick enough for me.

There was plenty of character depth which was great and I just know that Kubica fans will LOVE this, but it just felt a little meh for me.

Well, I feel conflicted on how about this one. I really enjoyed the opening and the changing timeline between past and present. We spend some time in the past with the neighbor Kate who lives by Josh and is watching the events of his missing wife and child affect him so deeply, and some from Meredith's point of view. In the present we have the left behind child of Josh and Meredith of Leo and Delilah as she is locked away in a dark basement wondering how long she's been there. We also have the first woman who went missing to consider, Shelby, and how her disappearance affected everyone and cast suspicion on the husband.

I wanted to become really invested in solving the mystery, but I think it got way too convoluted and unbelievable by the end. I really don't want to say much because it will give away what happens, but know this one does not follow a linear timeline and follows multiple characters. I've read and loved other Kubica books, so I'm thinking this one wasn't for me.

Mary Kubica has been writing excellent mysteries steadily ever since her debut of “The Good Girl” back in 2014. Kubica, who is often compared to Gillian Flynn, is one of the few authors who lives up to the comparison. She writes tightly scripted plots with endings that pack a surprise every time. Like Flynn, she lives in the Chicago area, and like Flynn, she has a talent for the technicality of mystery writing, but also infuses her stories with so much humanity.

Her characters breathe on the page, never tripping into the absurd, as often happens in mysteries these days. “Local Woman Missing” begins with two heart-stopping chapters. In the first, a woman sneaks out of her home at night for an illicit liaison, and then disappears completely. In the second chapter, a child is trapped in the filthy basement of a home, fed irregularly from a dog bowl. She manages to escape when her kidnappers give her a spoon that she sharpens into a shiv.

The book is fairly un-putdownable from then on, with Kubica agilely switching point of view and time period between the present, when the girl is rescued, and eleven years ago, when the child went missing along with the local woman. The very thought of the child living in a local basement is agonizing—imagining that she might be within shouting distance of someone who could save her is painful. Of course, it draws an easy comparison to Emma Donoghue’s “Room” (2010) and the idea of how such a child, raised in isolation, could ever recover from such a trauma.

Not surprisingly, the theme of the fragility of children runs throughout, accentuated further by a character who is a doula. Her inner monologue about giving the mother autonomy and choices sets a high standard of care in the mind of the reader, making it all the more devastating when women’s and children’s bodies are regarded without love and respect. An uncaring pelvic exam takes on a horror-like quality when the woman is not treated as a whole being, becoming one of the more harrowing scenes in a particularly grisly novel.

Kubica also examines the nature of neighbors and community. Most of the characters live within blocks of each other, their proximity sometimes a comfort and other times an uneasy proximity. The couple who managed to keep a child in their basement for eleven years reiterates that you never really know what goes on behind closed doors. In “Local Woman Missing,” no one is really the same outside their house as they are in it. (Kelly Roark)

“Local Woman Missing”
By Mary Kubica
Park Row, 352 pages

This book had me guessing the whole time! It was captivating and I couldn’t put it down! Great story again my Mary Kubica! Never disappoints!! So many twists and turns and constant guessing! You won’t be disappointed! Just released so get your copy now!

Well, this was a doozie, in a good way. There was a lot going on here, at least it felt like it from the audio, and the timeline jumps around a bit so I kind of wished I had followed along with the hard copy but I got it straightened out soon enough. If you keep it boiled down to the fact that Shelby has gone missing, and then Meredith and her 6 yr old daughter go missing soon after, the rest works itself around that, timeline jumping and all. It does have a twist towards the end that was a little odd for the story, but I think was necessary to wrap it up, and I enjoyed it nonetheless.

This was fast paced, and I could not put it down once I got started. I read it in one day because I had to know how this was going to end, which is always a sign of a fantastic thriller imo. I still need to read a few of her backlist books and plan on doing that soon.

Thank you to NetGalley and Park Row for the digital copy to review. PS, the audiobook is amazing and I highly recommend it that way.

Unfortunately I do not jive with Mary Kubica. This is probably my fourth attempt with her as I know she has lots of popularity in the thriller world. Not for me, but will have readers that look forward to this.

Wow, this one had me hooked & rapidly turning the pages! There was A LOT going on in this seemingly quiet, small town. Women are going missing and no one knows how or why. First, it's new mom, Shelby Tebow, who disappears when she goes out for a late night run. Then, it's Meredith Dickey and her six year old daughter, Delilah. Years later, Delilah has returns, after finally escaping her sadistic captors. Her father is thrilled to have her home but her younger brother, Leo, is skeptical of her story.

There are multiple narrators and timelines at play here and Kubica expertly weaves in red herrings while dropping bread crumb clues. There are some excellent twists that I never saw coming. However, some of them were highly unbelievable and required quite a suspension of disbelief, especially the end. Overall, this one really worked for me with its keep you on the edge of your seat suspense! If the end had been just a bit more believable this would have been a 5 star read for me!

Local Woman Missing is the latest novel to come from Mary Kubica, though it's the first one that I've personally read by her. Still, this one was more than enough to catch my attention.

Years ago, two women and a young girl went missing. The first to go was Shelby Tebow. Soon after, Meredith Dickey and her daughter, Delilah, disappeared as well. It tore apart the small community, leaving them suspicious of their neighbors.

Now, years later, the community has only just begun to heal. Only, something is about to happen to shake the community once again, as young Delilah appears, no longer lost but very hurt and confused.

"He stares at her too long, his expression unclear. "When people do dumb shit like this, they always wind up dead."

Local Woman Missing is a complex and disturbing tale of missing persons, betrayal, and secrets. This is a thriller that had its ups and downs to go along with a massive number of twists and surprises.

The novel is told through multiple perspectives, which helped to keep the tension going. Some events happen in the past, and then the current circumstances. Naturally, the revelations from the past tie into the present. That made some of the twists a bit easier to predict. But I didn't mind that much at all.

The characters are where Local Woman Missing really shined, at least in my book. I really enjoyed Kate's perspective, while Leo's side of things worked hard to break my hard. It was just the right balance to keep me invested right up to the end!

I had so much fun reading LOCAL WOMAN MISSING. Mary Kubica does such a great job developing her characters. There were just enough twists to keep the pages turning. I honestly didn’t see the ending coming!

'Local Woman Missing' by Mary Kubica was a well thought out thriller with many twists and turns. We first meet a young lady who makes a harrowing escape from her kidnappers, and she is presumed to be the young child Delilah who was kidnapped at 6. She is whisked away and placed with her long lost family and because of all the trauma she has suffered she doesn't recall her little brother or her father. The local Detective who has been working the case says the DNA came back as her being Delilah and the family tries to move on. The story goes back and forth between 11 years prior with points of view from Meredith, Delilah's mother, Katie (the family's neighbor and friend) and Leo the younger brother now. At first the time hopping was confusing especially between the different narrators and trying to piece the story together with what was happening now and then. However I enjoyed the clever way the story was put together and what actually transpired to make it all come to an exciting conclusion. I was shocked and surprised by the actual murderer, kidnapper and deceiver. This book does not disappoint for all those who love mysteries. Thank you #NetGalley and #Harlequin for this ARC in exchange for my fair and honest opinion.

If you haven’t read this, you should. It is grilling. It is atmospheric. It gives voice to the darkness that exists in a cute suburbia, underneath their powdered noses.

Shelby disappeared one week ago then Meredith and her 6-year-old daughter Delilah did. Meredith was found dead with a self-inflicted wound, where was Delilah? That was 11 years ago. Today Delilah returned, escaping her kidnappers after a long trial which formed the part 1 of the book.

Reading author Mary Kubica after a long time, the story was exciting and kept me on tenderhooks the whole time. I couldn’t read it fast enough. To know what Delilah went through at the hands of her captors shook my core.

Then the book moved on to the second section where it switched between the past and present, giving us different POV slowly building up the suspense, till the final reveal.

But then came my niggle. The ending didn’t do it for me. The expectations built were dashed. I wanted something believable and justifiable. Zip. Nada. Sigh…

Barring the ending, the rest was good. An impending danger and a sense of something wrong waiting to happen, egged me on. The story was quite a rollercoaster that was addictive in its plot and haunting in its characters.

Overall a fast addictive read.

Kubica's latest is a slow burn, leaving you guessing to the end. Will definitely be recommending this title for those that like thrillers this summer!