A review by tasharobinson
Something She's Not Telling Us by Darcey Bell

3.0

I was instantly grabbed by the opening of this book, where a helicopter mom tries to pick up her daughter from school and discovers she's been kidnapped — by a woman on the school's approved pickup list. And I was even more intrigued by the point a couple chapters in where the POV switches to the kidnapper, and we start getting to know her and liking her a lot more than we like the mom. But the deeper I got into the book, the more the ending was foreshadowed — what's going on with the kidnapper and why — and the twists come a bit out of nowhere and rely on some pretty unlikely behavior on the part of smaller characters. Plus we spend a fair bit of time in the head of the mom's brother, who whiffs back and forth between sympathetic trauma victim and self-absorbed asshole so often that the book gets whiplash. And then it builds up toward a thrilling climax, but abruptly stops. There are an number of frustratingly unresolved threads (the author spends so much time building up the question of what horrible thing Ruth did to the taxi driver to warrant his extremely unlikely and risky behavior, but we never find out what happened between them; the stolen passport is never found and there's no fallout from it; Eli just abruptly disappears as a character), and the ending is just so unsatisfying. This is a brisk, compelling read that kept hauling me back in — it's been a long time since I felt this energized to finish a book by an author I haven't read before — but the payoff left me disappointed.