'ALL THE MISSING GIRLS'........2 GONE GIRLS FOR THE PRICE OF 1......

All The Missing Girls by Megan Miranda (2016)   Let's get this out right now: out of the piles and piles of "Gone Girl" clones, this one's the real deal.  A stunner that had the BQ racing through the pages into the middle of the night......... high praise indeed, since at our age,  the only thing we usually race for in the middle of the night is the bathroom......

           This involves a young woman, Nicolette Farrell, and her harrowing return to the small North Carolina town where she grew up,  Rumors and secrets still abound about the mysterious disappearance of her charismatic, wildly destructive best friend Corrinne, ten years earlier.......

            Suspicion, fear and more secrets surface when another young girl disappears.....who happens to be the new girlfriend of Nicolette's high school lost-love-of-her-life, Tyler. Once again police and detectives descend to investigate the same cast of characters they dealt with in the last disappearance....Nicolette, her brother Daniel, Tyler, all their friends and even Nicolette's dementia-afflicted father, who claims to have recently seen Corinne on his front porch....

            Author Miranda wickedly plots enough twists and turns to keep your nose permanently glued to this book until you finish......and pulls off a rather dazzling high-wire act by telling the story backwards, with each successive chapter labeled "The Day Before".

             While the reverse order storytelling may stagger you in its cleverness, what impressed us the most was Miranda's ability to include incisive, wonderfully crafted insights and observations on the characters.......and doing this without ever, for a moment, slowing down the narrative.

             Easily the best thriller we've read this year......BQ recommends you dive into this one with all possible speed. 5 chilling stars (*****), a FIND OF FINDS......Gillian Flynn and her Gone Girl  have met their match in Megan Miranda and her gone girls......