Local Woman Missing by Mary Kubica

Happy Book Birthday Week to Mary Kubica whose latest, Local Woman Missing, releases this week!

Delilah and her mother went missing eleven years ago. Now, Delilah is back, but the mystery of what happened to them has never really been solved. 

Eleven years ago, Delilah was just six and her younger brother Leo was four. Meredith was working as both a doula and a yoga instructor. And given that her clients could go into labor at any time, it wasn't unusual for her to be working odd hours. 

But on the last day they were seen, she kept Delilah home sick with a fever. She dropped her son at the babysitter's. And that was it. No check in with her husband to say she'd been called to a birth. No messages about where they might have gone. She was later found dead, ruled a suicide. No one knew where Delilah had gone.

As it turns out, Meredith had been keeping secrets. Like the threatening messages she'd started to receive just a few months before her disappearance. And the malpractice suit against a local OB that she'd be testifying in. 

And then there's Shelby Tebow, the other woman who went missing not long before Meredith. As it turns out, she was one of Meredith's clients. She was also the one suing her doctor. But how are the two cases connected? Or are they even connected at all?

Mary Kubica is one of the reigning rulers of thriller and suspense these days and it's easy to see why. Local Woman Missing is compulsively readable, with twists and turns where you'd least expect them!

What's really interesting about the narrative is that Delilah herself seems to be our main character when we begin. But that's not the case at all. She gets one POV chapter and the rest of the story alternates between Meredith, in the months leading up to her disappearance; Kate, a neighbor, both present day and eleven years ago; and Leo, in the days after Delilah's return. 

The choice of narrators is interesting and the pacing is great. It makes for a tense read, though, waiting to learn the how and why of what happened all those years ago instead of getting Delilah's story first hand. 

And I promise, you won't see the end coming!

Huge thanks to the publisher for inviting me to be part of the release tour! 

For more on Mary Kubica and her work you can visit her website here. You can also like her on Facebook and follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Purchase links: Bookshop - Barnes & Noble - BooksAMillion - Libro.fm

When the Lights Go Out By Mary Kubica

Good morning, readers! Today I'm a stop on the TLC blog tour for Mary Kubica's latest, When the Lights Go Out.

Jessie Sloan's mother has died. She'd been sick for years, so long that Jessie had spent the latter part of high school and all of her adult life so far helping to care for her, putting her own plans on hold. But now it's time to move on. Time to get a place of her own (she can't bear to be in her home without her mother) and time to start thinking about her future. 

But when the college she's applied to calls to tell her that there's a problem with her social security information, Jessie's plans come to a screeching halt. Her attempts to clear up the matter only result in more questions, leaving her in a position where she must question everything she knows about her mother and her own past. But as she tries to unravel the mystery behind her own identity, insomnia sets in. And Jessie knows that she can only go so long without sleep. 

I've long heard that Mary Kubica was an author I needed to add to my reading plans. Unfortunately I think maybe this wasn't the best book for me to start with.

The book begins with Jessie's mother dying in the hospital. And Jessie has refused to sleep in case she missed her mother's final moments. But even in the wake of her mother's death, she still fights against sleep or flat out can't sleep at all.

She moves into a new apartment where she swears she hears things in the middle of the night, leaving her on guard. And then there's the problem with her school registration. Jessie never had a bank account and her job pays her in cash under the table, so she's never faced any issue associated with her social security number. But without her mom there to ask, it's left to her to figure it out. Her first step is to request her own birth certificate but apparently that's not possible either because she has so little information about herself, including her own father's identity.

With no family left and no one to turn to, Jessie's task is already a difficult one. But the lack of sleep makes everything so much more complicated.

Jessie's story is intriguing. And the insomnia aspects in particular appealed to me considering I'm a long time sufferer myself and can empathize with what she's going through. And her chapters alternate with a second story, that of a woman so desperate to have a child that she'd do anything.

The parallels between the two women in the story and their desperation are the driving force of the story, but the ultimate twist at the end was, to be honest, a let down. It's one I've seen too many times and one I've complained about almost as many times as I've seen it. I won't say what it is because I realize it's a personal opinion and I definitely don't want to spoil the book for anyone, but I was rolling along just fine and enjoying When the Lights Go Out until it was revealed. Which is a shame because for 95% of the book I could see exactly why so many people are fans of Kubica's work.

To see more stops on the tour be sure to check out the official TLC tour page here.

For more on Mary Kubica and her work you can visit her website here. You can also like her on Facebook and follow her on Twitter and Instagram.


Purchase Links: Amazon | Books-A-Million | Barnes & Noble