Review by Booklist Review
Popular podcaster Flowers (with cowriter Alex Kiester) follows her debut, All Good People Here (2022), with this dark tale of two women forever changed and linked together by their sisters' disappearances. In August 2012, two young women, Jules Connor and Kasey Monroe, went missing in small-town Indiana within weeks of each other. Their disappearances were startlingly similar and ultimately unsolved, despite the suspicions that they were killed by the same man. Seven years later, Jules' somber older sister, Jenna, walks into the restaurant where Kasey's prickly younger sister, Nic, is working, claiming that she's found new evidence and wants to team up to see if they can find the killer. Initially reluctant, Nic ends up throwing herself into the search, tracking down and questioning a suspect with Jenna, uncovering a devastating secret about Kasey, and violating the driver's license suspension she earned for a DWI. As Nic and Jenna pursue the truth about their sisters' fates, they grow close, and Nic starts to see Jenna as an older-sister surrogate. The narrative builds to a breathless and shocking conclusion that readers won't see coming. Impossible to put down, this stellar thriller will stick with readers long after the final page is turned.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Crime Junkie podcaster Flowers teams up with Kiester (The Truth About Ben and June) for a preposterous thriller about two women who try to track down their sisters' killer. Nic Monroe, 24, has been a mess ever since her older sister, Kasey, disappeared seven years ago. Kasey's car was found abandoned 150 miles from her hometown of Mishawaka, Ind., with the driver's door open and her purse on the front seat. The incident occurred two weeks after another young woman, Jules Connor, vanished under eerily similar circumstances. Though the bodies have never been found, police believe that both women were murdered by the same unidentified serial killer. In the present day, Nic's low-paying job and DWI conviction have kept her living at home with her father, who's still overwhelmed with grief. Then Jules's sister, Jenna, comes knocking. She suggests the two join forces, and they eventually unearth new information about their sisters' disappearances that stretches credibility to the breaking point. There's a certain soapy thrill in following the plot's melodramatic twists and turns, but they culminate in an absurd finale. This is a disappointment. Agent: Meredith Miller, UTA. (May)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Fans of Flowers's Crime Junkie podcast will experience the author's narrative style in full force in her latest mystery novel (after All Good People Here), this one written with Alex Kiester. Seven years after the disappearance of her sister Kasey, 24-year-old Nic is struggling with alcohol, a suspended license, and a dead-end job in Mishawaka, IN. Enter Jenna Connor, whose sister Jules also disappeared around the same time as Nic's. Told entirely from Nic's point of view, the story spirals into memories and explores the fragmentation of lives left behind with the recognition that everyone touched by potential murder lives with the inability to move forward. There's drama and fast-paced action alongside moments of humor, comfort, and casualness that bring the novel's small-town setting to life, both as it was before the girls vanished and as it is for Nic in the present. Psychologically nuanced, the book veers unexpectedly in its final chapters in ways that are as beautiful as they are unsettling. VERDICT Perfect for readers of Ashley Winstead and Nita Prose, this is a hard book to put down; expect to miss sleep looking for the Mishawaka girls.--Emily Bowles
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