Local Woman Missing is outside the genres I normally read. I’m not the murder podcast type, nor usually the “who killed the nice lady” book reader.
Because of this, I can’t really judge if this book was unique. My gut is that it was pretty formulaic, if only because it was twisty and full of red herrings to make you feel confident-confused-resolved-suspicious-confused-ohhhhh as you read. I did feel all those feels, but it still left me with my basic problem with this genre. There is no happy ending because even if you find the woman “not dead” all I can think about is how broken she’s going to be and how much therapy her kids are going to need and how her marriage may fall apart in a year anyway from the stress.
So I guess my point is, alive is good, of course, but not happy. And as I get older, I like books that end with certainty. I want to know what the trajectory is after the story.
Still, this was a very fast-paced read and full of enough moments of creative dialogue that I certainly enjoyed it. I read it in two days, which means a book is keeping my attention.
I also thought this book had reasonable confusion, in that I questioned a lot of what I was reading from unreliable narrators vs. just a story that is convoluted. The author really established the varying perspectives and swapped around so that you had to really think who knew what.
