Book Review of Local Woman Missing by Mary Kubica
We are so hit or miss with thriller books – we love them or hate them – so when we started hearing good reviews of Local Woman Missing by Mary Kubica it peaked our curiosity. Here is what we thought!
This post is a book review in the thriller books category – the Slowprose book review of Local Woman Missing by Mary Kubica.
Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links which, if purchased from, may result in a small commission, at no cost to the buyer.
Slowprose Review Format
Generally speaking, we don’t think of ourselves as “serious” reviewers, so our format may be a little different. Here is what to expect when you are reading Slowprose book reviews:
- Cover Review – doing the cliche of judging a book by its cover.
- Book Blurb – we share the book jacket or Goodreads blurb about the plot.
- Intrusive Thoughts – these are the general thoughts and feelings we have about the book while reading it.
- Book review – our overall review and star ranking of the book
- Book aesthetics – this is how gorgeous we thought the pages of the book were, or how easy/hard it was to read, or how good the narrator was if it is an audio book.
- Book recommendations – we talk about the author’s other books or other books that remind us of this book in some form or fashion. Basically, this is our catch-all to talk about anything else that we want to.
To see our full review system, including our method of assigning and weighting stars, go here.
COVER REVIEW – Local Woman Missing
This cover gets 3.5 stars. It’s decent! We like the picture of the sky with the top of the trees in the woods. It gives an ominous feel, particularly with the title of the book. Now that we have read the book, we like this cover even more.
BOOK BLURB – Local Woman Missing
Given our extreme irrational fear of ever being a spoiler for any reader, we will just share the book insert or book blurb found on Goodreads to provide the information in terms of the plot:
Thriller books – Local Woman Missing
People don’t just disappear without a trace….
Shelby Tebow is the first to go missing. Not long after, Meredith Dickey and her six-year-old daughter, Delilah, vanish just blocks away from where Shelby was last seen, striking fear into their once-peaceful community. Are these incidents connected? After an elusive search that yields more questions than answers, the case eventually goes cold.
Now, 11 years later, Delilah shockingly returns. Everyone wants to know what happened to her, but no one is prepared for what they’ll find….
INTRUSIVE THOUGHTS – Local Woman Missing
Not a bad start. First chapter definitely has a hook.
LOVE the story told from the basement. Great Chapter!!
Switching timelines is done well. Not hard to keep track.
Why the perspective from the neighbor?
Lots of talk on being a doula. So I guess that comes into play at some point?
When are we going to hear from the character in the basement again?
Ok, getting a perspective from the younger sibling. Interesting. How does he come into play?
3/4 in and still don’t know how this all ties together.
Decent wrap up of all the loose ends. A little unbelievable in some aspects, but ok. Lots of red herrings. But it is a thriller book so that makes sense.
Super disappointed that we didn’t pick up again with the perspective from the earliest chapters.
BOOK REVIEW – Local Woman Missing
Slowprose Star Rating – 3.0 Stars
Thriller books are such a mixed bag for us. We love the whole genre, but it seems that finding a really good one can be difficult. This is probably the genre that we will DNF the quickest. If it is terrible from the outset, then we will not hesitate to put the book down.
We finished Local Woman Missing! We really liked the premise, and the author did a good job of pacing and keeping us interested. The perspective switches between the present day and 11 years ago, and it wasn’t hard to keep track of or follow the switching timelines.
Her characters were also pretty much all fairly likeable. None were over the top one way or the other, so it really didn’t have us leaning towards anyone as being the perpetrator. The book really had a lot of things going on, and it wasn’t until the very end that all the loose ends got tied up. We felt satisfied with how everything wrapped up and all the questions were answered. There were a few things—more like elements to the story than actions by the characters—that got a lot of focus, so we assumed they had something to do with the final reveal. They didn’t. LOL.
We were completely stumped as to why the author chose to include the perspective of the younger sibling. It added nothing to the story, in our opinion. Even more baffling was that the author never picked back up with the initial narrator??? That was super disappointing because that chapter was our favorite of the whole book. We connected with her and wanted to hear from her again!
Overall, this was a decent book. Not one of the best thriller books we have read, definitely not one of the worst. Solidly a 3 star.
Slowprose Star Rating – 3.0 Stars
BOOK AESTHETICS
We listened to the audio version of Local Woman Missing via Audible
We liked the audiobook version. Generally speaking, thriller books are really great in audiobook form because they are typically fast-paced and exciting. They don’t give a lot of detail that might bog us down or have us rewinding 10 times to catch everything.
The narrator did a good job, and her voice was aesthetically pleasing. The narration of the basement scenes, in particular, was excellent. You could see how it would be difficult to do a good job when the dialog was structured as it was to really add to the story, but the narrator of this portion (not sure if it was the same person who did the rest of the book?) did an amazing job.
Slowprose Feature – Book Content Creator
Typically we have two books going at once – one audio and one physical.
Most of the time, when we listen to an audiobook we don’t have a physical copy of the book to take pictures of. We love to feature pictures of the book because, well, we are nerdy like that. We love book pics! So, we figured that reviews of audio books would be a great opportunity to feature other content creators and their incredible book pictures!
In this post you have seen the incredible picture from Zelia at zelia.loves.books featured. Please do go visit her beautiful feed and support fellow book nerds and creators!
BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS
A trope of thriller books that we love is that of a kidnapped person’s perspective. Similar to the early part of Local Woman Missing, we were reminded of two books that we considered to be excellent and love to recommend.
The first is ROOM by Emma Donoghue. We know that it has been made into a movie, but we haven’t actually seen that yet! This book was written in such a unique fashion (honestly, it had to have been hard to write it as it was written) that it was a whole experience beyond the story. We really loved it and would recommend it.
Another book recommendation for a story along these same lines is perhaps the lesser known Dear Child by Romy Hausmann. We absolutely loved this book and did not want to put it down. Highly recommend it!
You can find all these and more in our storefront, Slowestuff Books From The Blog storefront.
If you are looking for more book posts, check out the Slowprose section of the blog where we have some posts about Stephen King books and Sarah J. Maas books, among others.
We hope you have enjoyed this book review of Local Woman Missing by Mary Kubica.
If you love thriller books, be sure to check back often as we tend to regularly cycle mystery and thriller books in our reads throughout the year. Please tell us in the comments what you thought of Local Woman Missing!
Happy reading!
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