Reviewed by Linda C. Brinson
IT’S NOT HER. By Mary Kubica. Park Row Books (HarperCollins). 352 pages. $30, hardcover.
If you like mystery-crime stories that fall into the psychological and domestic thriller categories, Mary Kubica’s new novel would make a great book to read on your next vacation – but not if you’re going to a secluded cabin at a lake in northern Wisconsin.
That’s the setting where It’s Not Her gets right to work in its first chapter, when Courtney Gray, hears a terrifying scream that changes everything. Courtney and her husband and daughter are having a family vacation with her brother and his wife and three kids, staying in two cabins on the remote lakeshore. Her brother and his family have been going through rough times, and the vacation is an attempt to help them relax and sort things out.
The scream is from her young niece, who just walked back to her own cabin after a sleepover with Courtney’s 10-year-old daughter.
When Courtney hurries to the nearby cabin, she first finds the bloody body of her sister-in-law. Wild thoughts run through her head. But then she finds her brother’s bloody body too. Their 17-year-old daughter, Reese is missing. Their teenage son, Wyatt, is, somehow, sleeping.
What on earth has happened, and where is Reese?
Courtney is determined to find her niece – and to learn what really happened. Was there an intruder? Or did Reese, who struggles to control her anger and had quarreled with her parents the night before, somehow have something to do with it? And did Wyatt really sleep through everything?
The book proceeds through alternating chapters, told in the present by Courtney and in the immediate past by Reese. As the story unfolds, we see, as Courtney and Reese do, the darker sides behind the façade of both families. The two teenagers have a lot more going on than the adults realized. Even the younger girls have their secrets. And of course, the adults do too.
Courtney finds herself suspecting nearly everyone, even her own husband. The reader is equally suspicious and uneasy.
Reese, a troubled girl desperate to feel liked – and loved – struggles with her emotions, with what’s happening to her and what she thinks she knows. Kubica does an exceptional job of getting inside the tormented teenager’s mind and heart.
As it turns out, there are secrets in the small community near the lake as well.
The search for the truth – and for the missing girl – has surprising, even shocking, twists and turns right to the end.
It’s Not Her is Mary Kubica’s 10th thriller. She’s a popular, New York Times bestselling author whose books have been translated into multiple languages. This is the first of her books I’ve read. I’ll read another – if I’m in a place I’m sure is safe. …