Review: Missing Pieces by Joy Fielding

Missing Pieces by Joy Fielding






Rating: 4.0/5.0

From the book flap:

Family therapist Kate Sinclair reparis other people's troubled lives, all the while reveling in her stable marriage and handsome home. But there are demons in her past that will not stay buried forever, and the carefully constructed edifice of her life comes tumbling down when her half-sister JoLynn announces her plans to marry Colin Friendly, a man on trial for the brutal murders of thirteen Palm Beach women.

Kate soon finds herself embroiled in a desperate struggle to protect her family from Colin's increasingly sinister advances. To make matters worse, her aging mother is losing her tenuous grip on reality and her rebellious daughter Sara is falling under Jolynn's wayward influence - a development that would worry Kate in the best of times, but which in this case might well prove deadly. As the strain begins to tear Kate's marriage apart, into the fray comes the smooth-talking Robert, her high-school crush who soon displays an unhealthy interest in the results of Colin Friendly's trial.

As Kate Sinclair slowly slips across the razor-thin line separating ordinary life from unspeakable terror she realizes that there is no one she can trust, nowhere she can run...and no way she can deny that she and her loved ones may be the next targets of a demented serial killer.

I started reading Joy Fielding books in 2006 when I read Mad River Road. Since then I have read her new releases each year and have really enjoyed them. With my library system requests messed up at this time, I can't seem to get a hold of her newest, so I decided to work my way through her backlist (which my local library has on the shelves). This is how I came acrss Missing Pieces.

Missing Pieces follows Kate Sinclair, who on the outside looks like she has the perfect life but then the cracks start to show. Her oldest daughter is starting to pull away and be independent, tired of being compared to the perfect younger daughter. Her sister who has always been independent and little wild, has developed a fascination with a man being tried as a serial killer, and her mother is slowly falling prey to dementia. And in the middle of all of this, she runs into a man from her past, a relationship that never came to fruition, one of those what if's that most women have.

All of this forms the story as told by Kate. Slowly through the book all the pieces of the story begin to fall into place and it makes for an interesting plot and story to follow. We learn about her family and her past, and all that is going on. I enjoyed reading this book. It is well paced and the characterization is well done. You get to know each of the players at least in some sense, some better than others, but all are well-done.

If you like psychological suspense, this is a book you are sure to enjoy. If you enjoy Joy Fielding and haven't read this, make sure you pick it up. I enjoyed spending my time reading this and wondering what would happen next.

From: Library
Copyright: 1998
Publisher: Bantam books
# of pages: 432
Author's Website

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