👮♀️👮♀️
Missing Sister
Joshilyn Jackson
William Morrow
272 Pages
Harper Adult Audio
Publication Date: March 3, 2026
It has been years since I read this author and I recall loving the book. Either I have changed or she has changed. It is not that this novel is terrible but it was so much more ordinary than I was expecting it to be. The premise was strong; a rookie police officer who went into the field for the right reason—to make the world better, sees that the victim at a murder scene is a man she blames for her twin sister, Nix’s, death. She also finds another woman at the scene who discloses that this man’s death is part of a much larger scheme, which draws the officer into the investigation because she believes it has something to do with her sister’s death.
I know that another reason I decided to get this book, in addition to my passing familiarity with some of the author’s previous work, is because it concerned twins. I am inordinately interested in twins (I am an only child) and will tend to grab any book that involves that. The problem here that I had is that being a twin of someone who died and is somehow involved or referenced in an investigation of a current murder, is that it is central to the book and must, therefore addressed accordingly. The author made much of the fact that her sister was not only her sister but a twin and even if not identical, they were much closer than ordinary siblings, to explain her obsession with finding out what happened in this murder that impacted her sister’s death. This rookie officer, Penny, becomes personally involved enough to risk her career and be looked at as a suspect herself because this person was her twin and therefore a part of her.
This makes sense, somewhat. However, Penny and Nix had very different lives and evolved very differently. Penny went into law enforcement and is the one to generally follow the rules (even though she definitely doesn’t in the investigation) while her twin, Nix, was always involved with unsavory characters and took drugs. Now, it is not that siblings, or even twins, can be very different with very different lives, but if Penny sees her twin as the other side of her such that she becomes obsessed with finding out what happens to the point where she puts her own job on the line and her freedom at risk, I want to know why and how this happened. In other words, I wanted more of the back story of the two sisters and how they came to lead such different lives and to understand how Penny still felt so close to her sister that she took such risks.
The other problem with this lack of a back story is that we, as readers, don’t really understand what was so compelling about Nix that we want her murder to be solved. A character (sort of a character, since Nix has never been alive in the book) should be compelling. Even if the character is bad, we need to have a reason to be interested in them, especially where, as here, the novel is all about who killed her. On the surface, it seems like Nix was just a person who hung around with bad people and was hooked on drugs. People who make mistakes and do the wrong things can still evoke caring from the reader. Unfortunately, here, I did not really understand or care about finding her killer. In other words, Nix, an absent character who drives this novel, was not compelling enough for me to care about her. Although that may be difficult to do with someone who is already dead, the author could have used flashbacks or memories to provide readers with a reason to care about why she died, aside from being the protagonist’s twin sister.
Further, the pacing of the novel was a bit slow, especially for a suspense novel. I listened to the first half of the book on audio and that helped a bit. However, reading the second half was a slow slog.
Thanks to NetGalley, William Morrow and Harper Audio Adult for providing me with advanced copies of this novel. All of the opinions herein are my own.
Leave a Reply