Local Woman Missing

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 a once-peaceful Chicago-area suburb. After an elusive search that yields more questions than answers, the case eventually goes cold.

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

Mary Kubica tells the story across two timelines and three narrators. In the weeks before the disappearances, Meredith — a doula and yoga instructor increasingly frightened by anonymous threats — and her neighbour Kate take turns recounting a community that is not as safe as it looks. In the present day, Delilah's younger brother Leo, fifteen and resentful of the hole the case tore through his family, narrates the aftermath of her return. The two timelines converge on a domestic secret nobody in the neighbourhood suspected.