After her son goes missing in the middle of the day at Seattle’s Pike Place Market, Marin’s life falls apart. The FBI search doesn’t take long to go cold, and Marin turns into a shadow of herself–unable to dedicate time to her business, herself, or anything other than her utter depression over the loss of her child. She and her husband hardly speak anymore, he’s spending longer and longer times away from her and their home, and when Marin hires a private investigator to pick up where the FBI left off, she finds out why–Derek is having an affair.
Oddly, this seems to be the spark Marin needs to bring herself back to life. She might not be able to find her son, but at least she can stop herself losing her husband, and his affair partner is a problem that she can take it upon herself to fix… permanently.
This was an interesting book in that I didn’t actually like any of the characters all that much, yet still found myself entranced by the plot. I picked it up thinking it would be another brainless mystery novel (no shade to those, I love a brainless mystery), and what I actually got was a much more thoughtfully crafted plotline with a number of threads that all ended up tying together but not in the way I expected.
Marin isn’t an extremely likeable woman. She blames her husband’s affair partner for his cheating, even though he had just as much agency in the choice, and obviously choosing to take out a hit on your husband’s mistress is an insane thing to do. On the other hand, Kenzie, the affair partner, is definitely not a sympathetic character–she knows that Derek is married and chooses to fuck him anyway. Derek is a turd for cheating and for other reasons that I won’t spoil. Even Marin’s childhood friend Sal, who for much of the book seems like the only voice of reason, has skeletons in his closet.
And yet!! And yet I was so captivated by this read. Something about the way that these characters all went about their lives was fascinating to me even though I didn’t actually like any of them individually. Partly it might have been the “watching a car crash in slow motion” phenomenon, but I think it also had to do with the fact that even though I didn’t like any of them, I could still clearly see the throughlines of their motivations even in those bad decisions they were making. Masterfully written.
Rating: ★★★★☆ – The book was great and I would recommend it to anyone who likes this subject or genre, and I am likely to re-read it at least once.