All the Missing Girls by Megan Miranda

All the Missing Girls by Megan Miranda is a unique spin on the current missing "girl" genre (as in Gone GIRL, The GIRL on the Train, The Good GIRL, The Luckiest GIRL Alive, etc, etc). Yes there is a missing girl (or two in this case), and an unreliable narrator, but Miranda does something unique by telling the story mostly in reverse. Nicolette returns to her hometown in North Carolina to help her brother deal with her old house now that her father is in assisted living. She's haunted by the ten-year-old disappearance of her best friend, Corinne, and then the day she returns another "girl" goes missing. The story takes place over the course of two weeks, we're given the setup from Day 1 to start, and then the narration jumps to Day 15 and works backwards. Miranda lays clues along the way; a bloodied ring is mentioned one day, then a few days later (I mean, earlier) we learn where it came from, but the reader is left in the dark about most things, following the breadcrumb clues until returning to the beginning and discovering what really happened to both girls.

This book must have taken an awful lot of planning, and it could have come off as gimmicky or too artificially constructed, but instead it's a true delight! It keeps you on your toes not only from a thriller perspective, but also having to keep track of the timeline and what is actually revealed, or not. It will hook you from the beginning, and is one of those books that begs to be re-read immediately so as to see how the puzzle pieces all fit together.