BACK COVER:

“I’ve been following her for the past few days. I know where she buys her groceries, where she works. I don’t know the color of her eyes or what they look like when she’s scared. But I will.”

One night, Mia Dennett enters a bar to meet her on-again, off-again boyfriend. But when he doesn’t show, she unwisely leaves with an enigmatic stranger. At first Colin Thatcher seems like a safe one-night stand. But following Colin home will turn out to be the worst mistake of Mia’s life.

When Colin decides to hide Mia in a secluded cabin in rural Minnesota instead of delivering her to his employers, Mia’s mother, Eve, and detective Gabe Hoffman will stop at nothing to find them. But no one could have predicted the emotional entanglements that eventually cause this family’s world to shatter.

An addictively suspenseful and tautly written thriller, The Good Girl is a propulsive debut that reveals how even in the perfect family, nothing is as it seems.

REVIEW:

I want to reread this novel like it’s the first time every time. The Good Girl grasps you, seeps into your pores, and keeps you reeling after the last line is read. Kubica does a brilliant job of giving us hope only to crush it. She builds it up, despite the knowledge that it could never end well. Still, we hope against all intelligent thought, holding tight to that two percent possibility. She allows us to be a fly on the wall as we watch the pages materialize into a scene in our minds. She gives us all the characters we need to believe in a reality of the situation but carefully rewrites our expected perception of them.

A grief-stricken mother we should sympathize with but who instead only reeks of inadequacy, more annoying with every breach into her memory and witness to her actions. A despicable father we want to forgive and understand but brings out our worst thoughts, wishing him an express ticket to hell. A detective who should be the one to annoy us with his lacking personality and quickness to judge others but captivates us; an outsider who moves the story along swiftly, he is more observant than a therapist, more motherly than the mother. A good girl we should love and worry over, questioning her calmness and reservation, her forgiving nature but instead we find ourselves justifying her actions only to hate her in the end, filling us with disappointment and wonderment over her selfishness; if she had only been willing to tell the truth. Lastly, a selfish criminal who should be the sole source of our hatred but whom we instead come to love, root for, and worse, understand.

I love an author who gives the reader the chance to figure out the plot twist, the big “holy fucking shit! Are you fucking kidding me?! Noooo!” moment. Kubica plants the possibility, feeds us with the proper information, only for us to believe it simply cannot be. We don’t want to believe it and therefore we don’t. In fact, we forget the theory—complete toss it out the door—only for it to be dropped in our lap like an atomic bomb: devastating and consuming our mind for hours after we finished the book.

Twenty-four hours later and I’m still trying to recover.