PARALLEL SECRETS

In Barrs’ novel, a former reporter investigates the case of a missing 10-year-old girl.

When young Rose Willwood disappears from the central Missouri town of Walkers Corner, the various alerts that result attract the attention of unemployed reporter Vicky Robeson. She was fired three months ago from her job at a local TV news station and is currently enjoying her unstructured time with her boyfriend, Pete Harris, in Colorado, but she has a history with Walkers Corner. Nine years earlier, she worked on the story of a little girl named Lisa Dee, who’d been found walking alone, covered in blood, very close to where Rose recently went missing. Wondering if there’s a connection between the two cases—and seeking some kind of closure—Vicky and Pete travel to the small town, where a massive search is underway to find the missing girl (and where, as Vicky reflects, “she’d lived when everything in her life jumped tracks”). Once in town, Vicky reconnects with her former newsroom colleague Kerry James to bring herself up to speed on the case; the more she investigates, the more she seems to be putting herself in danger. Barrs unfolds her tale with practiced ease, deploying an effective array of red herrings to keep readers guessing along the way. She also increases the narrative tension by periodically shifting the point of view. As a result, readers get to hear from a variety of perspectives, including the little girls themselves, and the sometimes-conflicting tales feature tiny extra clues scattered throughout. As characters, Vicky and Pete occasionally feel underdeveloped, but readers will nevertheless become involved in Vicky’s quest for personal redemption.

A moody and effective missing-person mystery-thriller.