#BookReview: The Good Girl by Mary Kubica

Reviewer: Terry

I received a review copy

Summary:

“I’ve been following her for the past few days. I know where she buys her groceries, where she has her dry cleaning done, where she works. I don’t know the color of her eyes or what they look like when she’s scared. But I will.”

Born to a prominent Chicago judge and his stifled socialite wife, Mia Dennett moves against the grain as a young inner-city art teacher. One night, Mia enters a bar to meet her on-again, off-again boyfriend. But when he doesn’t show, she unwisely leaves with an enigmatic stranger. With his smooth moves and modest wit, at first Colin Thatcher seems like a safe one-night stand. But following Colin home will turn out to be the worst mistake of Mia’s life.

Colin’s job was to abduct Mia as part of a wild extortion plot and deliver her to his employers. But the plan takes an unexpected turn when Colin suddenly decides to hide Mia in a secluded cabin in rural Minnesota, evading the police and his deadly superiors. Mia’s mother, Eve, and detective Gabe Hoffman will stop at nothing to find them, but no one could have predicted the emotional entanglements that eventually cause this family’s world to shatter.

An addictively suspenseful and tautly written thriller, The Good Girl is a propulsive debut that reveals how even in the perfect family, nothing is as it seems….

Review:

The Good Girl is an emotional, thought evoking story about the disappearance of a prominent judge’s daughter. But more than that, it is a story about a girl who is kidnapped and saved by the same person. This story is written to be told from three different sides, Eve the mother of Mia the girl that is kidnapped, Gage the detective that is giving the grueling task of finding her, and Collin her kidnapper. It’s told in both past tense and present tense, which in itself is unusual as well as each chapter varying between the three points of view. A risky way to create a story that in this instance worked beautifully. This was quite simply an amazing story that will stay with me long after I have finished it and put it on the shelf.

Mia is an independent stubborn young woman who etched a life for herself out of the boundaries of acceptable behavior when your father is a well-known judge from a prominent family. Collin is from the wrong side of the tracks, scratching up every dollar he can beg, borrow and steal to take care of his mother whose health is sliding down hill at a rate he can’t keep up with. When he is offered a nice sum of money to simply lure Mia in to the arms of bad men that want to use her to get to her father, he intends to follow through but finds he cannot live with knowing she may be killed. So in a daring act of bravery he takes her away to hide, literally fleeing for his life.

As the story unwinds you find so much about the main characters and their “stories” you can’t help but have sympathy for them and how they all seem to unravel with the kidnapping and the months following.

This is truly a unique story that captivated and drew me in, one I simply could not put down.

4.5 stars