All the Missing Girls
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Monday, August 1, 2016
There’s been a trend in mystery fiction lately of deliciously twisty psychological thrillers featuring women in roles that mysteries don’t usually afford them. I’ve talked about it before, The Gone Girl effect, and how these thrillers that set up a traditional mystery scenario. A woman (usually respectable and middle class) is missing or dead. We presume she is the victim. Then the author takes all our usual assumptions shakes them up in a Yatzee cup, hits us in the face with them, and then tosses them out the window.
Sometimes the women in these books are a victim; sometimes they’re the killer. Sometimes they’re both. But they are always nuanced, complicated characters who refuse to be reduced to a pretty face on a reward poster. They can be cunning, manipulative, evil, mentally ill or just plain badass. They are never reliable as narrators.
This is a trend I am 1000% here for and All the Missing Girls by Megan Miranda is a wonderful addition to this new subgenre insuspense fiction.
The book opens with Nicolette Farrell coming back home to small town Cooley Ridge in order to pack up her father’s house. Her father has dementia and is in a nursing home, and Nic and her brother Daniel need to sell his house in order to pay for his care. After she turned eighteen Nic ghosted on her friends and boyfriend, Tyler, and left Cooley Ridge amid a cloud of suspicion. One of her friends, Corinne Prescott, disappeared and the rumors and allegations nearly tore the town apart. Corinne was last seen at a fair with Nic, Tyler, and Daniel, making them prime suspects.
Now it’s ten years later, and Corinne still hasn’t been found. Nic’s father, in and out of lucidity, starts talking, telling people he knows what happened to that girl. It starts the suspicion dust-storm up again and then another woman, Annaliese, goes missing–the woman who was Nic, Daniel and Tyler’s alibi that day, ten years ago.
I can’t tell you much more about the plot because I’d be giving too much away. The premise above is enough to make me grab for the book, but All the Missing Girls is so, so much more.
For one thing, the author employs an interesting strategy of telling the story backwards. We start with day 14 after Annaliese goes missing, the next chapter is day 13, etc. So the crisis point of the book is actually the day of the disappearance. As the narrative unfolds the reader understands that something cataclysmic happened the day Annaliese vanished, but we don’t know what. We’re left to weave in loose ends–off the cuff remarks from other characters, suspicions, gossip, and Nic’s actions which make little sense. Nic is sleep deprived, not eating, struggling to navigate in a community where she’s under everyone’s watchful eye. As she tells us the story of the past, of the day Corinne vanished, we also start uncovering snippets of the present day mystery.
At first I wasn’t sure the “telling the story backwards” thing made a ton of sense, but then as the mystery unraveled I realized how beautifully it worked. When I finished the book I was left with an OMG moment where everything fell into place perfectly.
It used to be that, hard boiled female detectives and/or Stephanie Plum aside, there weren’t a lot of women in suspense books that weren’t fridged for the purpose of driving the hero. In All the Missing Girls, women still feature heavily as the victim and/or launching point for the story, but they occupy a central focus that’s far more complicated than “dead girl.”
One of the things this book does beautifully is lend detail to the lives of the victims, especially Corinne. At eighteen she was a complicated, troubled young woman who was at once charismatic and compulsively likeable, but also mean. I’ve known people like this. I’ve had that friend, the one you’re waiting to turn on you. Corinne’s personality left some people whispering that she did something to deserve her unknown fate. But Nic knows that Corinne was also edit
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