The Missing Ones / A Hester Thursby Mystery Bd.2 (ePub)

Finisterre Island, a small isolated place off the coast of Maine, is normally a lovely and peaceful place. But a house with strangers annoys the locals as well as the summer guests since it seriously disturbs the idyllic atmosphere. When on 4th July a boy goes missing, suspicion rises. Just a couple of weeks afterwards, another boy vanishes. Is there a connection between these incidents and the newly arrived woman of the suspicious house? Annie seems nice enough, but she obviously has some secrets, not only her affair with a local policeman, but also her mysterious and sudden appearance in town.

The plot sounded intriguing to me, children going missing, a small island where everybody knows everybody, characters with secrets, but unfortunately, the novel didn’t really reach me. I found the beginning of the novel quite slow and it took me a lot of time to sort out the two lines of the plot. The toughest for me was the fact that I didn’t sympathise with any of the characters which makes it hard to really care for them and their fate. Additionally, what I really detested was how they all treated children. Just like some object that you thoughtlessly can move from one person to the next.

As I figured out much too late, this is the second instalment of a series. Maybe I just didn’t understand the crucial point of the novel since I hadn’t read the first book, there were actually some perplexing aspects that did not make too much sense to me. I also missed some kind of explanation for the characters’ really strange behaviour which unfortunately never came. All in all, a novel that I couldn’t really relate to.