Local Woman Missing

A thriller is a work of fiction designed to elicit a strong emotional response through suspense and plot twists. Domestic thrillers focus on the home environment, including intimate family relationships and the secrets they conceal.

The novel’s primary focus is on the personal, rather than professional, lives of the characters, and most of the events take place within a single neighborhood. Family relationships take center stage as characters deal with infidelity, loss, and dysfunction. Kubica critiques the modern suburban landscape. The suburban home is typically thought of as a place of refuge. In Kubica’s novel, it becomes a danger zone: Kate and Bea’s home is invaded by construction workers, Carly and Delilah are kept captive within homes, and Bea attacks Meredith at Meredith’s home. Overall, Kubica presents the domestic environment as being just as rife with conflict as the settings found in other thriller genres, such as legal and medical thrillers.

As a thriller, Local Woman Missing employs many literary devices that are hallmarks of the genre. The plot features several red herrings, or clues that seem significant but turn out to be unimportant. For instance, Cassandra’s texts and Dr. Feingold’s obstinacy, which have nothing to do with Meredith’s disappearance, are red herrings. Many chapters end with cliffhangers, as when the prologue ends with Shelby looking into the headlights of an oncoming vehicle. There are several plot twists throughout, including the revelation that Carly is not Delilah. The variety of narrators occasionally leaves readers wondering how to separate perspective from reality. Suspense grows out of Kubica’s decision to employ a nonchronological structure, saving the biggest surprises for the end of the novel.

Perhaps the largest deviation from genre norms comes in the form of the novel’s villain, Bea. In many thrillers, the antagonist is someone who, through careful planning and deception, causes harm and damage. Bea, in contrast, acts out of desperation, mostly improvising her actions. Though she is less conscience-driven than Meredith, she is not totally remorseless, and her decisions to kill Meredith and keep Delilah locked up transform her. By presenting Bea as more a victim of circumstance than an orchestrator of evil, Kubica draws attention to the oppressive nature of the suburban environment where Bea is trying to survive.

The prominent role of chance, both in Shelby’s death and the discovery of Delilah in Bea’s studio, diverges from thrillers with more procedural or investigative aspects. In Local Woman Missing, no one reasons their way to the truth. Instead, copycat criminals bring about Bea’s downfall; had Bea not abducted Delilah, Eddie and Martha would never have kidnapped Carly, whose escape from Josh’s house leads the police right to Delilah.

Whether readers choose to see cosmic justice or the inherent randomness of life is left to them; Kubica remains silent on the subject.