It's one of Penny Albright's final nights as a trainee before becoming an honest-to-goodness police officer, and things are about to get real. When Penny and her mentor show up at the scene of a homicide, she's taken aback to realize that she knows exactly who the dead man is. He's one of three men who sexually assaulted her twin sister, Nix, years earlier. It was a traumatic incident that set Nix on a depressive, self-destructive trajectory and resulted in her ultimate death from a drug overdose.

"The plot is twisty, to be sure, but that's not all that will keep us eagerly flipping the pages of MISSING SISTER. Penny's moral ambiguities and bad decisions are likely to both frustrate and fascinate us..."

As if that connection wasn’t upsetting enough, Penny also knows that this is not the first of Nix's rapists to recently die a violent death. One of the other two men had been killed just a month earlier. Reeling from the possible connection between the two homicides, Penny steps away from the scene --- and catches a whiff of blood nearby. A trained chef, she goes alone to follow her sensitive nose down an alley and encounters a woman she can only assume is the murderer, judging by the box cutter she holds in her bloody hands. Penny is ready to turn her in when the woman utters a single word that convinces Penny to let her go: "Sisters."

Penny's actions at the crime scene are certainly not protocol. When her fellow trainee swears to their bosses that he overheard Penny talking to someone else that night, she's (understandably) suspended while the force investigates. But while Penny has a shot at finding out who the mysterious killer is, she isn't talking to the other cops. She has her own investigation to undertake.

Complicating Penny's motives is that she has fantasized about just this kind of end for these men, not that she ever would have acted on it. But who else knows about the connection between them? And who shares her thirst for revenge? The answers to these questions are not at all what we might assume at first in Joshilyn Jackson's exquisitely complex new thriller.

The plot is twisty, to be sure, but that's not all that will keep us eagerly flipping the pages of MISSING SISTER. Penny's moral ambiguities and bad decisions are likely to both frustrate and fascinate us --- not to mention her deliciously talented culinary skills. In addition, she is surrounded by a number of appealing secondary characters.

Among them are her brilliant, tough-as-nails mentor on the force, as well as her commitment-phobic, internet yoga influencer older brother and his whip-smart computer hacker teenage daughter, to whom she is a quasi-mother figure. Both of these family members will play a role in helping crack her covert investigation --- even if the way she gets there might mean that she'll never graduate from her training program.

Readers who are already captivated by the Albright family at the end of MISSING SISTER might be in luck. The closing pages seem to indicate that this is only the beginning for Penny and her family.