All the Missing Girls

All the Missing Girls
by Megan Miranda
Published June, 2016

Obviously, it can be difficult to find a truly unique book, but one of my pet peeves is the tendency of publishers to declare that each and every new suspense novel is "the next Gone Girl" or, more recently "the next Girl on the Train". According to the blurb, All the Missing Girls is "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..."

Let's be clear here - All the Missing Girls is nothing at all like The Girl on the Train; it's set in rural Cooley Ridge in the southern US, rather than London. The stories are different. The characters are different. The timelines are different. There is one real similarity between the two though - they are both very, very good.

All the Missing Girls follows Nicolette Farrell as she returns to her childhood hometown, ten years after her best friend Corinne disappeared without a trace. In town temporarily to fix up her childhood home for sale, Nicolette is swept up into spookily familiar events as another local girl is reported missing. Through various twists and turns, Nicolette starts to shed light on events long forgotten as the truth comes out about the two disappearances, a decade apart.

Starting out in a fairly straightforward manner, the narrative of All the Missing Girls takes a sudden U-turn once Nicolette arrives in Cooley Ridge - we jump forward in time to fifteen days after the second disappearance and the rest of the novel is told in reverse, from Day 15 to Day 1.

This is an original take on a suspense novel and could go really badly wrong - and it almost does. This is not a novel that you can put down for a few days and come back to; you will be completely confused about where we're up to, what bits have already happened and what on earth in happening. It requires quite a bit of concentration to follow the story and it is frustrating at times, but ultimately Megan Miranda pulls it off nicely, turning a potential narrative gimmick into a unique way of building suspense.

I'm guessing that Cooley Ridge looks a bit like this

 Every character in All the Missing Girls is more than they seem, with both flaws and redeeming features coming out of the woodwork as more of the past emerges. Nicolette herself is a great character, equal parts strong and vulnerable with her desire to stay far away from Cooley Ridge conflicting with her affection for her hometown and family. Her high-school boyfriend Tyler is likeable and sweet, but the missing girl is his girlfriend and he doesn't seem at all concerned. Nic's brother Daniel is sensible and family-focused but has an apparent history of violence. Even Nic's dementia-affected father is three-dimensional, his years of alcoholism and history of poor parenting conflicting with a devotion to his children and a need to protect them. This cast of complicated characters adds a certain depth to what would otherwise be a fast-paced but not-particularly-meaningful story.

All the Missing Girls is original,gripping and complex. To follow the story properly, you really need to read it all in one sitting but that's really not asking much - the cracking pace and twists-and-turns narrative mean that this is a hard one to put down.

8/10