Book Review | If I Disappear

Rating | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

To help you understand the protagonist right off the bat, she is as obsessed with Rachel/Rachel's True Crime podcast as I am with Dan Jones and Buffy. Her name is Sera, so do with that what you will.

Sera loves true crime podcasts and when Rachel, her favorite host, goes missing, Sera decides it is time to do something. She's been more or less adrift the last few years, and Rachel's disappearance suddenly gives her purpose. These podcasts have given her some hope, showing her that she can do something productive in a world where women like her disappear daily and no one bothers to look too hard for them.

Sera takes the clues she's uncovered from Rachel's podcast episodes and this leads her to Rachel's family's ranch outside Rachel's hometown. Sera secures a job as a ranch hand, something that she has no experiences in being, but she knows she has to do whatever it takes to find out what happened to Rachel. She is so focused on making Rachel proud, doing an investigation of her own, that she doesn't at first notice how off the isolated ranch feels. And finally Sera discovers that Rachel is not the first woman to go missing at the ranch. Yet her family, people from town, other employees? They don't seem terribly concerned. Sera has to figure out what's going, before anyone else disappears.

So, I LOVED this one. Loved it. Absolutely crazy to me that this was a DEBUT, when it was so masterfully told. The character development was top-notch and getting to know all of these people made me feel like I was in the story with Sera - who, by the way, totally unreliable and those are MY FAVORITES!

Sera doubts herself so much at times, that it's hard to see if this really is all a ruse on her part or not. She's extremely reliably unreliable and it really helped build the tension and suspense. Not to mention one never was quite sure which direction her investigation would go next as she started putting things together.

The atmosphere at the ranch is suffocating at times. And with so many suspicious characters to choose from, there really was no getting away from the mystery for even a moment. The reader does not get much of a chance to regroup with revelation on revelation and I could not put the book down because I was as invested as Sera.

This book first came out when the craze to include podcasts as a device was taking off and I think besides Sadie by Courtney Summers (this book WRECKED me. Sadie is etched so deeply in my bones, I STILL think about this book constantly), this is the best I've read that does so. Some choose to use podcasts because they don't know how else to deliver needed information, but that's not the case here. The podcast is Sera's guide and she refers back to episodes as she looks for Rachel, picking apart the clues she believes she's found.

The book is fast-paced, propelling the reader forward to its stunning conclusion and the story wraps up in a satisfying, if unexpected way.

Highly recommended.