The Good Girl - Mary Kubica

This was an interesting book that didn't turn out to be at all what I expected.

I don't quite remember where I got the recommendation from, but this had been on my list of books to listen to for a while. I do prefer the audiobooks for my fiction, and this one turned out great. The synopsis does a good job of setting up the story, but there are still some surprises along the way.

First of all, there's the way the story is told. The author uses rotating first person perspectives between Colin, Eve, and Gabe. This lets us be in the mind of the perpetrator, someone worried about the victim (her mother), and the detective who is trying to find the victim. It also jumps in time throughout where Colin's perspective are consistently in the moment of the kidnapping but Eve and Gabe could either be looking for Mia or trying to piece together what happened after it all.

I was also pleasantly surprised to find that the "emotional entanglements that eventually cause this family's world to shatter" was not just some straightforward Stockholm syndrome. It's much more complicated than that. Both Colin and Mia are much more complicates than that.

As the pieces began to fall into place, it became satisfying to watch it all play out but wasn't particularly surprising anymore. I thought Mia's brief moment as a point of view character in the epilogue was interesting but not really necessary to close out the story. I suppose that's why it was the epilogue, but I usually find them more satisfying than I did with her. Perhaps it was what she added to the story more than that it was there.

Altogether it was a great book, though. It kept my interest and was well paced. I thoroughly enjoyed all the characters. Surprisingly, I think Colin was my favorite. He was developed well enough that I just couldn't help it.