Fragile (The Hollows, #1)

by Lisa Unger

A thrilling novel from New York Times bestselling author Lisa Unger about the hunt for a missing girl and one community’s intricate yet fragile bonds. 

“[A] nail-biting nuanced whodunit.”—People

Everybody knows everybody in The Hollows, a quaint, charming town outside of New York City. It’s a place where neighbors keep an eye on one another’s kids, where people say hello in the grocery store, and where high school cliques and antics are never quite forgotten. As a child, Maggie found living under the microscope of small-town life stifling. But as a wife and mother, she has happily returned to The Hollows’s insular embrace. As a psychologist, her knowledge of family histories provides powerful insights into her patients’ lives. So when the girlfriend of her teenage son, Rick, disappears, Maggie’s intuitive gift proves useful to the case—and also dangerous. 

Eerie parallels soon emerge between Charlene’s disappearance and the abduction of another local girl that shook the community years ago when Maggie was a teenager. The investigation has her husband, Jones, the lead detective on the case, acting strangely. Rick, already a brooding teenager, becomes even more withdrawn. In a town where the past is always present, nobody is above suspicion, not even a son in the eyes of his father.  

As she tries to reassure him that Rick embodies his father in all of the important ways, Maggie realizes this might be exactly what Jones fears most. Determined to uncover the truth, Maggie pursues her own leads into Charlene’s disappearance and exposes a long-buried town secret—one that could destroy everything she holds dear.

• ISBN10: 0307393992
• ISBN13: 9780307393999
• Publish Date: 16 August 2010 (first published 3 August 2010)
• Publish Status: Remaindered
• Out of Print: 18 March 2014
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Shaye Areheart Books
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 327
• Language: English

Reviews

[Joni Reads]

Saw this at my library book sale for 50 cents and had to pick it up. I have never read anything by this author before but it sounded good and I never pass up a good kidnapping story.

First off, the writing bothered me. Maybe because the main narrator was a therapist but she kept using the term "low-grade" to describe how she was feeling. "A low-grade headache", "a low-grade anxiety", etc. It was used often enough that I picked up on the over use of it.

That aside though, the story was great. It's one of those novels where every chapter is narrated by someone different, ala Jodi Picoult. It was confusing at first but once I got about 10 chapters in I could recognize the "voice" of the narrator and know right away whose thoughts I was reading.

The story was well thought out. The many characters are all connected by so many small things that all are woven together to matter a lot in the scheme of things. I loved how the author tied everything together.

I have one book by this author waiting on my shelf. While the overuse of that one phrase bugged me, it's not enough to turn me off of this author and I hope to continue reading her novels.