Local Woman Missing

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER—OVER A MILLION COPIES SOLD!

"Dark and twisty, with white-knuckle tension and jaw-dropping surprises." —Riley Sager, New York Times bestselling author of Home Before Dark

In this smart and chilling thriller, master of suspense Mary Kubica takes domestic secrets to a whole new level, showing that some people will stop at nothing to keep the truth buried.

People don't just disappear without a trace…

Shelby Tebow is the first to go missing. Not long after, Meredith Dickey and her six-year-old daughter, Delilah, vanish just blocks away from where Shelby was last seen, striking fear into their once-peaceful community. Are these incidents connected? After an elusive search that yields more questions than answers, the case eventually goes cold.

Now, eleven years later, Delilah shockingly returns. Everyone wants to know what happened to her, but no one is prepared for what they'll find…

Don't miss Mary Kubica's chilling upcoming novel, She's Not Sorry, where an ICU nurse accidentally uncovers a patient's frightening past...

Look for these other edge-of-your-seat thrillers by New York Times bestselling author Mary Kubica:
The Good Girl
The Other Mrs.
Just The Nicest Couple
She's Not Sorry
It's Not Her

Mary Kubica is a New York Times bestselling author of suspense thrillers including The Good Girl, The Other Mrs., and Local Woman Missing. Her books have been translated into over thirty languages and have sold over two million copies worldwide. She’s been described as “a helluva storyteller” (Kirkus) and “a writer of vice-like control” (Chicago Tribune), and her novels have been praised as “hypnotic” (People) and “thrilling and illuminating” (L.A. Times). She lives outside of Chicago with her husband and children.

Visit Mary at http://www.marykubica.com/

“[A] daringly plotted, emotionally eviscerating psychological thriller.” —Publishers Weekly

“Impossible-to-see-it-coming…. [Kubica] takes readers to a whole new level of deceit and irony.” —Booklist

“[Local Woman Missing] will appeal to fans of Lisa Jackson and Gregg Olsen…. The twists, turns, and an unpredictable ending make it irresistible.” —Library Journal

“I’m shamelessly addicted to Mary Kubica’s juicy, unpredictable reads, as much for her well-rounded, fully human, flawed characters as her sizzling plots—and she just keeps getting better. LOCAL WOMAN MISSING is a propulsive journey through a winding maze of secrets, leading to a jaw-dropping twist that I never saw coming. Loved every minute.” —Joshilyn Jackson, New York Times bestselling author of Never Have I Ever

“Dark and twisty, with all the white-knuckle tension and jaw-dropping surprises readers have come to expect from Mary Kubica.” —Riley Sager, New York Times bestselling author of Home Before Dark

"Complex, richly atmospheric and thoroughly riveting, Local Woman Missing is a thoughtful look at how even the most innocuous secrets between happy couples and beloved friends in tightly knit neighborhoods can sometimes turn so unexpectedly and terrifyingly deadly." —Kimberly McCreight, New York Times bestselling author of Reconstructing Amelia and A Good Marriage

Mary Kubica’s Local Woman Missing is a suspenseful psychological thriller that explores fear, grief, secrets, and the hidden fractures inside an ordinary suburban community. The novel begins with a disappearance that unsettles an entire town, but it quickly becomes clear that this is not a simple missing-person story. Instead, it is a layered narrative in which several vanishings, shifting perspectives, and buried truths slowly come together. Kubica builds the novel around the idea that the most frightening dangers are often the ones closest to home, hidden behind familiar routines, smiling neighbors, and the illusion of safety. What makes the book gripping is not just the mystery of what happened, but the emotional damage left behind in the lives of those connected to the missing women.

The story focuses on Shelby Tebow, Meredith Dickey, and Meredith’s young daughter Delilah, all of whom disappear under troubling circumstances. Shelby is the first to go missing. She is a local woman, a mother, and someone whose private life is more complicated than it may appear from the outside. Her disappearance shocks the neighborhood, but before there is time to fully process it, Meredith and six-year-old Delilah vanish as well. The close timing of these cases leads people to assume they are connected, and the community quickly becomes gripped by fear and speculation. The image of women and a child disappearing from an ordinary suburban setting creates immediate tension because it challenges the sense of security that such neighborhoods are supposed to represent.

Kubica tells the story through multiple viewpoints and across different points in time, which allows the novel to reveal information gradually. Rather than giving the reader a clear, linear account, the narrative moves between characters who each hold only part of the truth. This structure is central to the suspense. Every perspective adds new details but also raises new questions. The reader sees how fear spreads through the neighborhood, how suspicion takes root, and how people’s personal flaws and hidden choices become more significant as the mystery deepens. The fragmented storytelling reflects the emotional confusion of the characters themselves, many of whom are struggling to understand what happened while also hiding things from one another.

One of the novel’s strongest elements is the way it captures the instability beneath suburban normalcy. Families appear functional, marriages look intact, and neighbors seem familiar, but the story steadily exposes the loneliness, resentment, secrecy, and desire that exist beneath those surfaces. Mary Kubica is especially skilled at showing how ordinary lives can contain deep emotional fault lines. Her characters are not simply puzzle pieces in a thriller plot. They are people carrying private disappointments, strained relationships, and unspoken needs. As these tensions build, the mystery becomes not only about where the missing women are, but about what kind of emotional world allowed their disappearances to happen unnoticed or misunderstood.

Meredith is one of the most emotionally important figures in the novel because her disappearance carries the added weight of motherhood. She is not portrayed as a perfect or idealized woman, but as someone living a complicated life marked by both love and strain. Her relationship with her husband and her role as a mother give the story emotional depth because her absence is felt not only as a mystery, but as a rupture in family life. Delilah’s disappearance makes this even more painful. A missing child introduces a particularly intense fear into the novel, and Kubica uses that fear carefully, not just for shock, but to highlight the long-term consequences of trauma and uncertainty.

When Delilah eventually reappears years later, the novel takes on an even darker and more emotionally layered tone. She is no longer the little girl who vanished. She returns traumatized, withdrawn, and deeply changed by whatever happened during those missing years. Her return does not bring simple relief. Instead, it opens a new stage of the story, one focused on memory, identity, and the painful difficulty of piecing together the truth after prolonged captivity and silence. Delilah’s condition reflects the cost of what she endured, and her presence forces the people around her to confront not only what was lost, but what cannot easily be restored. The mystery shifts from disappearance to aftermath, from absence to the difficult work of understanding survival.

A major theme in Local Woman Missing is the unreliability of appearances. Throughout the novel, people make assumptions based on what they think they know about their neighbors, friends, and spouses. These assumptions prove dangerous because they allow real truths to remain hidden. Kubica plays effectively with the gap between public identity and private reality. Characters who seem trustworthy may not be, and people who appear stable may be hiding fear, shame, or guilt. This keeps the reader off balance, but it also serves the novel’s larger point: evil does not always announce itself in obvious ways. Sometimes it grows quietly inside familiar spaces, protected by routine and disbelief.

The book also explores the emotional complexity of trauma. Delilah’s experience is especially central here, but the trauma spreads beyond her. The families and community members left behind are also changed by years of uncertainty, grief, and unresolved questions. Kubica shows that when someone goes missing, the damage extends far beyond the moment of disappearance. It enters marriages, reshapes family roles, hardens people emotionally, and leaves behind fear that does not fade easily. Even when answers begin to emerge, they do not erase the years of pain. This gives the novel more emotional weight than a straightforward twist-driven thriller. It is not only concerned with surprise, but with the human cost of fear and loss.

The suspense in the novel builds steadily rather than relying only on fast action. Kubica uses unease, emotional tension, and carefully timed revelations to keep the reader engaged. Small details become important later, and scenes that initially seem ordinary gain darker meaning as the truth comes into focus. The writing style is accessible and immersive, making it easy to move quickly through the book while still feeling the emotional pressure of the story. Kubica has a talent for making domestic settings feel claustrophobic and uncertain, which works especially well in this novel. Kitchens, bedrooms, neighborhood streets, and family routines all become part of a larger atmosphere of dread.

As the mystery unravels, the novel reveals connections and motives that reframe earlier events. The truth behind the disappearances is disturbing not only because of what happened, but because of who was involved and how close the danger really was. This is where the novel’s title gains its full force. The missing women are not distant strangers or abstract news stories. They are local, known, part of a recognizable community. That closeness is what makes the horror feel so intimate. The threat comes from within the world everyone trusted, not from outside it.

By the end, Local Woman Missing delivers the answers its mystery has been building toward, but those answers are emotionally unsettling rather than neatly comforting. The resolution ties together the disappearances, the secrets, and the hidden relationships that shaped the case, while also acknowledging that some wounds remain long after truth is uncovered. Kubica understands that solving a mystery is not the same as healing from it, and that distinction gives the ending more emotional realism.

Overall, Local Woman Missing is a tense, emotionally charged thriller about disappearance, captivity, and the dark secrets that can exist inside ordinary lives. Mary Kubica combines a strong sense of mystery with a close attention to family tension, trauma, and the fragility of trust. The novel succeeds not just because it asks what happened, but because it shows how fear changes people while they wait for answers. It is a story about the hidden dangers behind suburban familiarity and the painful truth that sometimes the people closest to us are the ones we understand the least.