Reviewed by Terri M. LeBlanc on
I was immediately sucked into Missing Pieces. The prologue pulls you in and from that point forward the story doesn’t really let up. Set in Iowa, Jack returns with his wife, Sarah, after a close relative is seriously injured. Jack left Iowa over 20 years ago and this is his first trip back. Through the course of the novel, Sarah discovers things about Jack that she never knew. It’s creepy. It’s scary. It will make you want to avoid basements in old farmhouses. It will have you looking at your significant other and asking, “There aren’t any secrets about your past that you want to share, are there?” I may or may not have asked my husband this several times during day it took me to read Missing Pieces.
The book is fraught with tension which Gudenkauf has mastered writing. As Sarah slowly starts to put the pieces together, your mind starts turning and you can’t flip the pages fast enough to get to the reveal. And that’s where this story falls short. It hits a sour note on the reveal. Not enough pieces were shared for me to make the connection until it was too late. This is my least favorite thing about mystery novels. I want to get to the point of discovery JUST before or JUST as the character figures it out.
That’s not to say that Missing Pieces is a bad book. It got my heart racing. I kept asking questions. I kept looking at my husband out of the corner of my eye. I finished the book in one day and said at the end said, “Well, I didn’t see that coming.” It also got me out of a funk of one bad novel that I finished and one bad novel that I decided to DNF. Gudenkauf’s writing certainly delivers even if the ending was a bit rough.
This review was originally posted on Second Run Reviews
Reading updates
- Started reading
- 9 January, 2016: Finished reading
- 9 January, 2016: Reviewed