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Like the spellbinding psychological suspense in The Girl on the Train and Luckiest Girl Alive, Megan Miranda’s novel is a nail-biting, breathtaking story about the disappearances of two young women—a decade apart—told in reverse. It’s been ten years since Nicolette Farrell left her rural hometown after her best friend, Corinne, disappeared from Cooley Ridge without a trace. Back again to tie up loose ends and care for her ailing father, Nic is soon plunged into a shocking drama that reawakens Corinne’s case and breaks open old wounds long since stitched. The decade-old investigation focused on Nic, her brother Daniel, boyfriend Tyler, and Corinne’s boyfriend Jackson. Since then, only Nic has left Cooley Ridge. Daniel and his wife, Laura, are expecting a baby; Jackson works at the town bar; and Tyler is dating Annaleise Carter, Nic’s younger neighbor and the group’s alibi the night Corinne disappeared. Then, within days of Nic’s return, Annaleise goes missing. Told backwards—Day 15 to Day 1—from the time Annaleise goes missing, Nic works to unravel the truth about her younger neighbor’s disappearance, revealing shocking truths about her friends, her family, and what really happened to Corinne that night ten years ago. Like nothing you’ve ever read before, All the Missing Girls delivers in all the right ways. With twists and turns that lead down dark alleys and dead ends, you may think you’re walking a familiar path, but then Megan Miranda turns it all upside down and inside out and leaves us wondering just how far we would be willing to go to protect those we love.
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I really enjoyed that! So interesting the way it was written and felt like I got my answers for the most part.
0Read this book for a book club.
This is basically a mystery 'what happened' where the "hook" is that the story is told backwards. This method I think was done quite well, because the reader progressed forward in page count and the story's chronology ticked backwards day by day. Somehow the reader is still able to continually add new information and attempt to construct the plot.
I thought before I read it: "If it's a mystery of what happened to this missing girl, isn't the regular way of an investigation that the event happens and then over time a case it built until it's solved? How can we start with the solved or almost figured out and go backwards, so each day we would have fewer and fewer clues?"
There are a few moments of this happening, where something new happens on day 12 and therefore we know about it already when we are reading (50 pages later) about the characters wondering about it on day 10. But overall, the book is constructed so that there is not excessive mentions of what has already happened but that we the readers haven't read yet. The instances that do occur (I felt) served to pull the reader forward, not overly frustrate.
Somehow, if you were to plot the amount of tension and action on a graph, the resulting line would probably be pretty similar to a traditionally written mystery: usually a first chapter that is the crime/sets up the story; starting to figure out what happens leads to more and more clues and tension until there is a climax of confronting the bad guy/solving the crime/dramatic conclusion; sometimes there is an epilogue or result of the court ruling. This same peak, rising action, climax, conclusion is still had with All the Missing Girls because all the action and discovery seemed to happen within a day or two of the disappearance: our main characters are involved with the disappearance of the contemporary girl and have found the answer to the old case from years previously. So it is very quickly chronologically after the current girl goes missing that a lot of action happens, so this is revealed 200 pages in for the reader. Additionally, the final clues for why the girl disappeared are discovered many days after she has gone missing, which the reader read about on page 30 but did not know the significance at the time.
Overall, I enjoyed this book, was a quick read even though there was a bit of having to pause to order things in my head a few times. I did not think that there was a good balance between the two cases--the contemporary missing girl had the right pacing and amount of suspense, but the older case was revealed in spurts and the resolution (that the main two people had accidentally hit her with the car and the dad hides the body) was sort of dumped all in one big rush towards the end of the book. Additionally, when the police come to question our main characters toward the end, I thought it was a bit too perfectly wrapped up, that they were able to say they were witnesses for each other and that was all there was.
Knowing how the book ends, and knowing that on day 1 or 2 was when our main characters found the old body and had known about that case for all the rest of the days, I know it was not feasible for how the book was written, but I thought it was unrealistic for them to not think about it in the days after. Obviously the author couldn't write that they were traumatized or thinking about what they'd done or had regrets on days 4-15 because the reader was reading days 15-4 before getting to the action, but I think that anybody who had to move a discovered body and had the conclusions to a 15 year old case would have to be thinking about it.
I really liked how when the old case was reviewed, the ring and pregnancy test and maybe something else were all attributed to the missing girl, but in reality these items were really the main character's and twisted the whole story. I thought that was pretty cool to learn.
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