Still Mine by Amy Stuart

Still Mine is the debut thriller by Canadian writer Amy Stuart, the first of a trilogy that includes Still Water and Still Here. Our central character is a damaged woman on the run, enlisted to help find a missing woman. Her own broken past merges with the search, and we discover more about both women at the same time.

Taking place over one week, Clare O'Dey arrives in the one-stoplight mountain town of Blackmore to find the motel closed, and the residents warning her off.

"Turn around... that's my advice."

She rents a dilapidated Airstream on the property of the local drug dealer and witnesses the bad blood between him and his neighbors, Wilfred and Louise, the parents of the missing woman. Shayla was a notorious junkie, split from her abusive ex-husband Jared before she disappeared ten days ago. In rehab six times, it was not a surprise she went missing, assumed she just ran off—could she have been murdered?

The town is still haunted by a mining disaster from five years ago, when 32 men were killed and 18 trapped, and many have slid into addiction. Shayla's father, Wilfred, was considered to blame, and her mother, Louise, has dementia, believing Shayla is still with her.

Clare meets her friend Sara, the local doctor Derek, and befriends the ex-husband Jared. With an addictive past herself, Clare's own story is more of a mystery than Shayla's for most of the book, very slowly revealed. She escaped a drunken and abusive marriage, never to return. Six months later, private detective Malcolm Boon has tracked her down and offers her the job of finding Shayla. Someone hired Malcolm to find Shayla—but who?

For most of this novel, I was in the dark about both women, the story slow to gain momentum. I wouldn't recommend this middling thriller for that reason; there wasn't much action to grip me. The stories of Clare and Malcolm continue immediately after this ends in the sequel Still Water and the end of the trilogy Still Here.

I am intrigued enough to continue the story, but I am not rushing into it.

2016 / Tradeback / 336 pages

My other reviews of Amy Stuart:

A Death At The Party