Blog Tour: Missing White Woman – Kellye Garrett

The truth is never skin deep.
 
It was supposed to be a romantic getaway weekend in New York City. Breanna’s new boyfriend, Ty, took care of everything—the train tickets, the dinner reservations, the rented four-story luxury rowhouse in Jersey City with a beautiful view of the Manhattan skyline. But when Bree comes downstairs their final morning, she’s shocked. There’s a stranger laying dead in the foyer, and Ty is nowhere to be found.
 
A Black woman alone in a new city, Bree is stranded and out of her depth—especially when it becomes clear the dead woman is none other than Janelle Beckett, the missing woman the entire Internet has become obsessed with. There’s only one person Bree can turn to: her ex-best friend, a lawyer with whom she shares a very complicated past. As the police and a social media mob close in, all looking for #JusticeForJanelle, Bree realizes that the only way she can help Ty—or herself—is to figure out what really happened that last night.
 
But when people only see what they want to see, can she uncover the truth hiding in plain sight?

Kellye Garrett is the author of Like a Sister—an Edgar nominee for Best Novel, Anthony Award winner for Best Hardcover Mystery, and Lefty Award winner for Best Mystery—as well as Hollywood Homicide, which won Agatha, Anthony, Lefty, and Independent Publisher “IPPY” awards for Best First Novel and was named one of Time’s 100 Best Mystery and Thriller Books of All Time and BookBub’s Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time, and Hollywood Ending, which was nominated for both Anthony and Lefty awards. Prior to writing novels, Garrett spent eight years working in Hollywood, including a stint writing for Cold Case. She is a New Jersey native, a cofounder of Crime Writers of Color, and a former board member of Sisters in Crime.
 

My thoughts: this was a really interesting, thought provoking, and enjoyable read. I liked Bree, who after finding a dead body in her Air B&B and her boyfriend going missing, turns detective in order to prove that neither she or Ty, her boyfriend, had anything to do with the body she found.

With a blend of social media and traditional news media dogging her – Bree is relying on the blend of both to keep her updated, even after she gets doxxed, and help her figure things out. The current obsession with true crime and citizen detectives puts pressure on the police to move faster as the 24/7 online focus is getting in the way.

Bree can’t risk being seen at the crime scene but she needs to find clues, things she half remembered that might prove her innocence and give her the key to why the woman in the Air B&B was left there and Ty vanished. 

There’s a serious point to this book too – the hyper focus on missing attractive white women that means missing and murdered women of colour are overlooked and receive little to no coverage in either traditional media or online. Had Bree been the victim, the chances are no one would be obsessing about her and trying to find her killer in the same way.

*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.