Krysten’s Review

Warning: Rant incoming.

The premise of Missing Molly was great. The execution? Not even close.

The opening line inspires little excitement and is in fact pretty bland (“I was looking forward to coming back to work this morning after my holiday, but now that I’m here, something doesn’t feel right.”), and it doesn’t improve much from there. I thought about DNF’ing but instead, I eventually started skimming just get to the end. The writing is amateurish, the characters are flat, and the dialogue is laughable. The number of times I thought, “CTFO, no one would EVER say/do that” is documented in my Kindle notes, and it is many.

From the get go, you know that the narrator is Missing Molly, which is admittedly a good way to get people to read the book (it’s what sold me), but it kills a lot of the tension right off the bat. The abrupt, anticlimactic reveals continue throughout the novel, from the nonchalant way Rachel drops who the real killer is to how Jacob reveals that Dennis’ mother has proof he couldn’t have killed her family. Some chapters end on a general musing that made it easy to put the book down, while others end on cliffhangers that go nowhere. You have to read several more pages before the narrator comes back to it (or she just doesn’t at all, like when Emily Dawson randomly says Rachel sounds familiar and asks if they’ve met before… never mind the fact that it’s completely unrealistic, but WTF happened to that?!). There were so many instances where the author tried to build tension but let it just collapse by the next sentence.

And the characters: First, Rachel. She is the most naive “street smart” person you’ll ever meet. She’s 26 years old and had to look up the word “idyllic,” the concept is marketing is “over her head,” and has never heard of Thelma and Louise. Vivian, who wants more than anything to be a journalist (except for that one part where her dream is to get married and have babies), but stumbles over the term “source.” Mike, the star writer, whose best attempt at a podcast intro is “Missing Molly, a true crime podcast delivered to you by the South Hackney Herald (which everyone thought was “catchy”). Chris, who says things like “Okay, go away, I’m busy. I’ve had enough of you” and gives tasks like “Maybe do some research on the technical side of things.” And Jacob, who offers to help Rachel after she throws him in front of a bus and gets him fired (and he is the best character of them all).

As for the podcast… Having worked on a podcast myself, I can tell you: It’s not a thing you can put together overnight, you don’t get sponsors right away, and it’s very (VERY) rare that a brand-new podcast would get thousands of listens on the first episode without a shit-ton of paid advertising and a lot of marketing leading up to it. The fact that it took them only 2 weeks (!?!?) to pull off the first episode of a show that would require a LOT of research and fact checking is completely unrealistic. I understand with thrillers there is a certain amount of suspension of disbelief you have to do as a reader, but this, along with everything else, was too much.

The book, I see, was self-published in 2018, and this is a republish under a trad publisher. As a struggling self-published author myself, I am happy for Barelli, but it’s very disappointing to me that this is a “cream of the crop” book that gets picked up for trad pub. There are literally dazillions of self-published books that are more deserving of this. I hope the author has improved since this was written and earned her trad pub deal. But one thing’s for sure… I won’t waste my time with another of her books to find out.

Thank you to Netgalley and Poisoned Pen Press for a complimentary ARC.