By Mary Kubica

I’m going to be truthful, I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with Mary Kubica’s books. For example: I LOVED The Good Girl, however, I could not force myself through Local Woman Missing. I’m not sure why, it just did not grab me. This book did grab me, but I guessed the ending (or the main plot twist) from page 1. Maybe that’s not that impressive since the title of the book seems to kind of give it away.

The books begins with Meghan, a critical care nurse, who’s new patient, Caitlin, was found at the bottom of a bridge – seemingly due to a suicide attempt. All the staff at the hospital are fascinated by Caitlin and dwell on what the motive would be for her to try to end her life. Meghan bonds with Caitlin’s parents and they begin asking for her to be the nurse in charge of Caitlin anytime she’s working. Meghan seems grateful for this so she can personally keep an eye on Caitlin’s progress.

Meghan runs into an old high school friend, Nat, at her divorce support group and is suspicious that Nat is being physically abused by her husband. Meghan tries to help Nat, but like in most cases, Nat can’t seem to leave her abuser and Meghan is constantly worried about her friend’s wellbeing.

At home, Meghan is divorced and living with her 16-year old daughter, Sienna in an apartment in Chicago. There has been a slew of attacks on single females in their area so Meghan has been wary of leaving her daughter alone at home. Strange things start happening to Meghan while she’s around her apartment. She gets locked in the basement of the apartment building, she is getting strange mail, and she feels like she’s being followed.

Eventually, stories about Caitlin start to come to light and it seems that maybe she’s not an innocent girl with a hard life, but someone who has hurt many people, including her family. The police show up to the hospital to announce that Caitlin was pushed and had not jumped. As Caitlin starts to heal and is closer everyday to waking up from her coma, Meghan starts to learn more about the type of person Caitlin was. Now Meghan has to figure out who she can trust and if anyone knows who pushed Caitlin.

I’m actually good up here, thanks.

Overall, I enjoyed the book a lot and got through it in one day. It was a lot predictable, but it still had a lot of tension and mystery. Not as good as The Good Girl, but it was a fun read. Let’s do some pros and cons.

Pros: Short chapters, which made it a quick read. A lot of different dimensions to who could be the ‘bad guy’.

Cons: A little predictable. The ending left me with a lot of unanswered questions and didn’t make a ton of sense (to me).

Overall rating: 7/10