In 1979, 9 year old Michelle Fortier, the child of a wealthy family, went missing without a trace from her home in a small town in Quebec. Years later, following her failure to launch a podcast about the mystery and start a new life in the city, Stephanie, the daughter of the town drunk, decides to return to the small town. She’s out of money and more interestingly, a flood has revealed the body of a child who may be the missing Michelle. But to find out the truth, Stephanie has to face her past and the past the town would rather keep buried.

Nina Laurin has written about 5 or 6 books now, including the popular Girl Last Seen, and The Starter Wife, which I’ve read and quite liked. She writes female-lead domestic thrillers, with twisty, turny plots and intriguing family dynamics. They’re fairly quick reads, the type that have the word “Girl” featured in the title a lot and would work really well as Netflix series. (Did anyone else enjoy the Netflix series from 2022 The Woman In The House Across The Street From The Girl In The Window, starring Kristen Bell? It’s a fun satire on books of this genre and type)

In this book, the plot gets going on the first few pages, which I really liked, and the story is set in 2017, with Stephanie returning and starting to ask questions, and has interspersed chapters of her mother Lauren in 1979 in the days leading up to the disappearance. There are also a few chapters that are the research or script that Stephanie wrote for the defunct podcast on Michelle. Without saying too much about what happens in the book, it does have some great themes or motifs of true crime podcasts, small towns and secrets, missing children, rumours of witchcraft and conspiracy theories.

This book feels a little more Gothic than Nina Laurin’s usual writing, and it also reminded me a little of stories like VC Andrews, in tone. I really liked the way the author showed the small town as dying slowly as the rivers flooding starts to take the land back and it seems like there’s not a lot of work there. The drives down main street past the empty, ruined buildings was very atmospheric and the way that everyone watches what everyone else is doing and judges felt very claustrophobic. I think this was a really good aspect of the story. It’s the same but different, a fresh location, fresh themes and ideas, but still satisfying what we want from a story like this: interesting lead, dark spaces, secrets and lies, mystery, twisty plotting and fast pacing. I also liked the way our lead character, Stephanie, was quite tough and cynical. She’s a bit snarky and sarcastic, she has a bit of grit, but she’s not completely a pessimist and she’s not blaming others for her life circumstances, which means that she’s someone you can root for and she’s not a downer to read about, even as the book is set in a depressed town and she has a dysfunctional family. It could be bleak, this story and this place, but it’s more dark and intriguing than anything.

As I was reading this, I was thinking how much this book is the other side of small town life. So often, in romance novels or things like classic era Hallmark movies, small towns are where you leave your door unlocked, find belonging, and there’s a sense of community and maybe solidarity. Where families are dysfunctional, these stories offer healing. In this book, we get the other side of the story. Sometimes small town life can be poverty and jealousy, it can be things never changing, malicious gossip or being assigned a place in life that you can’t leave. When Stephanie wants more than this life, there’s a sense that she’s bucking the natural order and not accepting her place is at the bottom. How dare she want something different? It’s like the anti-Hallmark, and in my experience, this is very true of the other side of small town life. It’s not always pretty and kind. And it makes for a great story setting.

On the whole, I think this is perhaps the authors best so far, and she shows a wonderful grasp of nuanced, complex character development and creating atmosphere and place. I really enjoyed this twist and refresh of the genre.

I will say though, the podcast thing in this book doesn’t make sense. Stephanie seems to have been given a job or hired as a podcaster based on a pitch (?) for a podcast about Michelle, and then fired when the podcast wasn’t a success. Podcasts are not radio. This was really odd. If she wanted to make the podcast, she would have researched it and made it, then sold it to a producer, perhaps, but more likely just put it out there herself. I don’t think legally, if the “local media outlet” hired her, they could just let her go. Surely they, whoever they are, would reassign her? Most podcasters, even the big ones, it’s not their main job. It seems like a gross misunderstanding of the way podcasts work. Also, there’s a lot of true crime podcast bashing in this book, with it being stated that Stephanie is ghoulishly exploiting Michelle’s story for her own ends. (The book often refers to her wanting to be “famous on the internet” or “go viral”, which was very funny to me). I get that people often feel this way and perhaps our lead character is doing this here, but I think it’s interesting that true crime podcasts get tarred with this brush, but not news reporting or tv shows that cover the same content. Stephanie is actually a trained journalist, so it’s an interesting theme in the book.

This book has a couple of flaws and maybe a small plot hole here and there, the characters choice at the end may be a little soft for some, but I was entertained and interested the whole time. I think this one would make an excellent TV series, something along the lines of Sharp Objects. It’s satisfying in the way it hits the tropes we want in a book like this, but also takes it in a more Gothic direction, uses it’s small town Montreal setting and some fresh ideas well. This may be the authors best yet, and I hope it presages more books in what might be Canadian Gothic, Montreal Gothic? I’m not sure, but I liked it.

Read It If: you ever wished to leave your small town life behind… This one is for domestic thriller lovers, those who enjoy Gothic themes and ideas, and lovers of a twisty turny mystery read. Very entertaining.

Thank you to HBG Canada for the copy of this book for review.