eProof Review - Missing White Woman

Sometimes, you crave a book as soon as you seen the cover online. It’s almost a physical reaction. This is what happened when I saw Missing White Woman by Kellye Garrett. I saw someone tweet about it with the UK cover and I became obsessed with it. I mean, LOOK AT IT! And 24 hours later, it appeared on NetGalley so, of course, I had to request and hope that I would be approved. 

Which I was (hooray!) and once I finished Kate Atkinson’s Normal Rules Don’t Apply, I jumped straight into this. 

Title and Author: Missing White Woman by Kellye Garrett

Publisher: Simon and Schuster UK

Bought, Borrowed or Gifted: Gifted by UK publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review/reaction

Buy From (Affiliate): uk.bookshop.org

It was meant to be a romantic getaway in New York City. Just Breanna and her new boyfriend, Ty. They hired out an airbnb four-story house with a beautiful view of the skyline. Until Bree wakes up one morning to discover a dead woman in her foyer and Ty’s missing. Is the dead woman Janelle Becker, a recently missing dog walker that the media is reporting on and social media is a buzz over? 

A Black woman stranded in a strange city, Bree is scared. A black person involved in the white person’s disappearance/murder isn’t a good look. And she knows how the Police sees her. And until she can find Ty, the only person who can help her is an ex-best friend, a lawyer who Bree shares a complicated history with. 

But as the Police and the social media mob close in, Bree realises that the only way to stay out of jail is to discover what happened that night. But is she going to like what she finds…?

I finished this last week at an airport and this is a really nice holiday thriller to read by the pool with an iced cocktail of your choice. However, the more I think about my time reading this, the more I feel like I was tricked by the beautiful cover and what I read wasn’t what I signed up for. 

Yes, this is a thriller with a murder and complex friendship at its heart. Yes, it makes for very easy reading. However, I found a good chunk of the story quite slow and that, within the first few chapters, it just tried too hard. 

It tried too hard to make you like Breanna and her mysterious past, it tries too hard to make us like her and Ty’s relationship, tries too hard to make you care about the missing Janelle (aka the missing white woman of the title) and Ty when he disappears (not a spoiler, it’s in the blurb), it tried too hard with the messy friendship with her ex-best friend, it tries too hard to tackle the issues of race, identity, the media and social media obsession with true crime (especially when it features a white, blond woman at its heart), online detectives and the dangers of social media and how the narrative online can be twisted to push an agenda. All this is forced at the read within the first few chapters and it’s like a sledgehammer. It felt as if the author wanted to drill in these point very early on and, because of that, some of the mystery vanished. And I can’t help but wonder that if the writing was more subtle, all these issues could still have been tackled still be tackled with subtly and nuance.

I did like what the book was trying to do and I did like the writing (so I am going to try Kellye Garrett again), but the execution was messy.