Review: All the Missing Girls by Megan Miranda

All the Missing Girls by Megan Miranda

Blurb from Goodreads:

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. 

My Review:
It's a familiar story in thrillers lately, especially those with unreliable female narrators: girl leaves home after something terrible happens, she builds a new life (usually with a new love) but doesn't reveal anything about her hometown and what happened, girl comes back to her hometown (and usually an old boyfriend is still there) and the past can't help but make itself known to her new life . . . things get complicated and maybe scary.  This story is told backwards, which seems like a fun trick, but it was actually done so well in this book that I gasped out loud more than a few times.  You think you already know what's happened in the past two weeks by starting from that point but you don't, at all.  While I didn't love the ending of this, I loved the writing, the pacing, the reveal -- I didn't figure things out until the book was in the middle of it and, even then, I was left guessing several times over.  I can't wait to read more from this author!

All the Missing Girls comes out today, June 28, 2016, you can purchase HERE, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this one to fans of thrillers and fans of unreliable narrators; this one is a great exemplar of what an author can do with this genre!  

THESE WOODS ARE MINE.   

These were the woods I grew up with.  They stretched from my home and wove through all of town, connecting everything, all the way down to the river and out to the caverns.  It had been years, but if I stopped thinking so much and moved by heart, I could follow countless paths through them, day or night.  They were mine, and I was theirs, and I shouldn't have to remind myself of it.  But now there were too many unknowns.  The scurrying of animals in the night, something so unsettling about the nocturnal, about things that needed the dark to survive.  Things breathing and growing and dying.  Everything in perpetual motion. 

These woods are mine.