Synopsis
In this immersive thriller a father resumes the search for his missing daughter after the case of her disappearance goes cold. Great for fans of Gillian Flynn, Stieg Larsson, Tana French and Mary Kubica.
On a frigid December night, Megan Floyd vanishes from the mountain town of Fraser, Colorado. The extensive search provides no answers and as attention of her disappearance fades, the case goes cold. Her father, Tom Floyd, is forced to confront his worst fear that his daughter will never be found, and soon his life and marriage begin to disintegrate around him.
A year after the disappearance and with no new leads, Tom hires private investigator Marshall York, a former detective, and his assistant Hannah Jacobs. They soon start to uncover the secrets of Megan’s dangerous second life, all while fighting their own demons. Tom is guilt-ridden over a missing child case from his past, and Hannah is haunted by the unsolved murder of her older sister.
The case begins to consume all three of their lives, and as they dig deeper, they start to unravel the dark truth of what happened to Megan.
Review
Thanks to netgalley and No Bueno Publishing for the audio ARC.
This is a thriller that mixes in a lot of imperfect humans and emotions. Megan Floyd vanished into the night. Even after an exhaustive search, one of the largest in recent years in Colorado, she still isn’t found. Over a year later, even when faced with a failed marriage and a lost career, her father Tom can’t let the trail run cold. In a last ditch effort, he hires a private investigator firm to assist with a new set of eyes. As more and more clues and new trails begin to be uncovered, it’s a race against time to the end—and Tom is steadfast she’s alive.
As an audio production, I thought the narrator, Jess Nahikian, did a good job with the story and voices. The thing that immediately threw me though, were the fast and often POV changes. I did check a kindle sample and I’m pretty sure there were page breaks, but in the audio there was nothing. By the time I was settling into a character they were gone, so I felt like it took a long time to learn them. As a life long fantasy reader, I am a fan of multi-POV storytelling, however, chapter two for example, was around 60 minutes long (not even the longest)—all with continuous changes. I would rather read a story with 300 chapters personally, with the shift in character changing each time.
As a writer myself, I feel like we are always looking to add to a character. A bit of emotion or a troubled past? That gives them depth in short order! But in this novel, everyone, even characters of lesser importance, are drunks, drug addicts, self harmers, divorced and hurting, grieving and struggling, sometimes even unrelated to the plot in any way. I suppose it’s certainly true that life is filled with trials, but this got to the point of being a distraction…especially when trying to learn the characters. Not all of them of course, as the struggles between Megan’s parents made sense, held weight, and did achieve a sort of tortured hero feel for the father. He accepts the loses and shames himself for the fact that she’s missing, and that kind of self loathing is driven home thoroughly.
The mystery, which on the whole I did enjoy(!), did feel a little like things were turning up too easily. Not that I have knowledge of Colorado detective’s solve rates or anything (and it’s fiction), but some of what the PIs and Megan’s father were doing and discovering seemed like day-one level choice making. Obviously without them we wouldn’t have a story, but it felt like the choice to make it happen a year after the disappearance made those cracks appear. With minimal spoiler-ing, I would also have to say the choice to have the idea of Megan being alive so often throughout the novel was truly fumbled by the book’s end, if nothing more than the final nail in the coffin for hope…and while writing this, that might actually be the whole point though!
When I finally did get into the flow of POV shifts and long chapters, this was written with enjoyable prose and a unique enough murder mystery that I didn’t feel cheated by the end (that’s hard to do these days!). There are some darker themes in the goings-on and character struggles that do add to a thriller feel and I did felt an overall build in tension. As this is book 1 in a series, I suspect they only get better from here.
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