All too often, in attempting to embed the jaw-dropping twists that readers expect to be present in modern thrillers, authors create stories that are so convoluted and unrealistically complex that they require a significant suspension of disbelief. In this Local Woman Missing, Kubica managed to weave a tale that was both incredibly twisty and entirely believable.

It appears that their collective trust has been misplaced and that the perpetrator of these crimes isn’t some wayward straggler but, more alarmingly, a person in whom they placed their trust. And what she tells the person who happens upon her shocks everyone: she is Delilah Dickey and, for 11 years, she has been kept captive in a basement.Īs Delilah tries to settle back into a life she long ago forgot, living with her bereaved father and the brother who was barely old enough to remember a time before her disappearance, police and community members revisit these cases with a renewed energy and a revitalized confidence in their ability to unearth answers that have too long remained hidden.īut what they find is something that they could never have expected. Given the fact that these two eerily similar occurrences take place both so geographically and temporally close to each other, it seems impossible that they aren’t connected.ĭespite the interest and dedication of community members, though, the cases go largely cold.īut then, on a day not so different from any other, a diminutive young woman is found, injured and malnourished and dirty. Then, only a few weeks after, Meredith Dickey and her daughter Delilah also go missing. First it’s new mother Shelby Tebow who disappears. It’s been 11 years since three people went missing in what was, otherwise, a safe and secure community. Unlike the podcast I couldn't stop binging, Mary Kubica's newest novel, Local Woman Missing, isn't an account of a true crime, but it certainly reads like one.

Listening to story after story after story of murder and rape and still unexplained disappearances is enough to make anyone feel like it's not a matter of if, but when, you fall victim to your own tragedy. While I have pretty much always been an incredible wimp, my general unease was certainly exacerbated by the fact that, while working, I would ingest a steady diet of old episodes of the Crime Junkie podcast.

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