CHLOE CATES IS MISSING

McHugh’s debut tackles an age-old question: What’s a mother to do when her daughter, who’s been the star of her obsessively curated mommy vlog for nearly 10 years, disappears?

Thirteen-year-old Chloe Cates, whom the offline world knows as Abigail Scarborough, is the creation of Jennifer Cates, nee Jen Groff, whose online production of “CC and Me,” nourished by commercial tie-ins and Jennifer’s boundless appetite for grooming her daughter for stardom, has finally been generating enough income to surpass Jackson Scarborough’s salary as associate director of his Albany firm’s marketing team. Even before she vanishes from her bedroom one night, leaving her window open and her cellphone behind, Chloe’s carefully fictionalized life has been built on papering over her constant resentment of the stage mother from hell. And that’s not the only tension that bubbles beneath the domestic surface. Chloe’s older brother, JJ, has set her up with her own social media accounts as Abigail. Abby’s met a boy online who knows nothing of her avatar. Jackson has skeletons in his own closet. Even Emilina Stone, the police detective assigned to the case, is the last person in the world Jennifer wants to see because the two of them share knowledge of a guilty secret that goes back to their own school days, gradually revealed in an obligatory series of flashbacks. McHugh manages this tangle of subplots with practiced efficiency, quickening the pace of dramatic, if not exactly surprising, revelations till the final pages.

Never remotely plausible or even original, but a tale guaranteed to keep genre fans up till dawn.