Missing Sister by Joshilyn Jackson
An Explosive Beginning
Missing Sister is a heart-pounding, edge-of-your-seat thriller that gets off to an explosive start right from the opening pages when a rookie woman police officer discovers that the victim in her first murder case investigation is a man she has long blamed for her sister’s death.
Officer Penny Albright is shocked to recognize the face of the corpse as one of three men who raped her twin sister Nix, sending Nix on a tragic downward spiral that ended with her dying of a drug overdose several years earlier.
Not far from the crime scene, she then confronts a mysterious woman who clearly was the man’s murderer, but Penny decides that her desire for revenge and also answers about her twin sister’s death take priority over everything else—even her duty as a police officer to arrest this woman.
Best-selling author Joshilyn Jackson masterfully lays out this fascinating premise—of family/sisterly love vs. professional duty—in the first few paragraphs of the book when Penny tells the reader:
“From the first night I laid eyes on Thalia Gray, I knew she was a stone-cold killer.
“Granted, she was sitting on a back alley stoop with a wet, red box cutter beside her. The blood was so fresh it was still tacky in places, plus I’d just walked off a murder scene; it would be fair to say, Penny…this is not some big intuitive leap.
“No one else was going to make that leap, though. I wasn’t going to let anyone else make it, especially the cops. The real cops, I mean, because that was the night I learned I had no business being one.”
The Stakes Keep Rising
The stakes are raised even higher when we learn that another man from the three who raped Nix was also brutally murdered earlier (a secret link between the two victims that Penny has not shared with anyone else on the police force), and she must now decide whether or not she wants to try to save the third man involved in Nix’s attack even though she has hated him for so long since her sister’s death.
Penny describes the inseparable bond she and Nix had as twin sisters growing up (“Nix and Pen…Pen-Nix” is the way they were known)—and how she has been haunted since her sister’s death by an undecipherable last voice mail message her twin left for her with the words “cold and bad, Pen…I’m scared of my…please can you…feel like a ghost already.”
Besides Penny, there is her brother Gand, an irresponsible young man who she loves and tries to protect despite his flaws; Gand’s teenaged daughter Shadow, who Penny is helping to raise; her own mother and father; Penny’s female mentor on the police force, who begins to suspect some of her secrets; and an ex-boyfriend of Nix’s named Michael, who Penny is attracted to herself now and who offers to help her get answers about Nix’s death.
The Heart of the Story
But, most of all, it is the incredible close relationship between Penny and her twin—even years after Nix’s death—that is really at the heart of this powerful story about sisters and about grief and about the desire for terrifying revenge.
This is what propels Penny to put everything else in her life in jeopardy—even her new career as a policewoman—in order to get the closure she so desperately needs about Nix once she realizes that the mysterious woman murder named Thalia may have the answers she’s been looking for so long.
“Walk away,” Thalia tells Penny when she is first found with the bloody murder weapon. “This is not a story about a rookie who stumbles onto a killer and solves the case and becomes a big damn hero… This is not a story about cops at all.”
“I asked, ‘What is it about then?”
“Sisters,” she said.
And, for Penny, that is the most important thing of all—her sister. Even in death, the bond between Nix and Penny is still so strong she still “talks” to her twin when she needs her—like this exchange from the dramatic climax of Missing Sister when Penny is convinced that she is not going to survive.
“I asked Nix, ‘Is he going to kill me?’”
“My twin snorted: ‘Of course, you dumbass.’”
This story leaves the reader thinking about the questions of integrity, loyalty, sisterhood and family love that have been raised and wondering how we might have reacted to all these things if we were in Penny’s place.
Joshilyn Jackson has written a series of acclaimed twisty psychological thrillers in the past that have propelled her into the top ranks of best-selling authors—and this one won’t disappoint her growing legion of fans. Missing Sister is another winner for her!
About Joshilyn Jackson:
Joshilyn Jackson is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of eleven other novels, including Gods in Alabama and Never Have I Ever. Her books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. Jackson is also a former actor and an award-winning audiobook narrator. A recent expat from the American South, she and her family have settled in upstate New York.
