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Have You Seen My Sister? by Kirsty McKay

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I won this in a GR giveaway and this is rounded up from a 3.5. Overall I did enjoy this mystery. I thought the red herrings were well sprinkled in. On the other hand, I did have some issues with some of the point of view character Esme's choices (though she is 15 and judgement centers have a min. of a decade more to develop into adulthood).

Esme's family is visiting New England from England (where we're not sure. The Canadian border isn't far, it's ski country and they keep talking about driving into Boston) Her older half sister Gaia has gone missing after a goodbye party that Esme also attended but only partly remembers. (this and her 'clumsiness' are part of her dyspraxia) The addisons, the wealthy family and friends to Esme's family only get the resort security involved at first as Gaia is college aged and might have just left on her own. Esme and her family don't buy that for an instant (and it seemed like a way to interject how Gaia's case might be viewed thru a racist lens as she, unlike Esme, is biracial).

There are plenty of suspects, Craig a 30ish ski instructor, a few other ski people, Scott who was reality show famous and was working with Gaia to get back into the limelight, a few sketchy types and several others. Naturally Esme's family is out searching but Esme is also out playing Nancy Drew with a local boy Bode (there's a shoe horned in side romance here which I found distracting and weird. She's thinking about that while her sister is missing?)

I had a good idea who had to have some involvement from the moment they found Craig's truck because yes, he too is missing. The ending is a wee bit over the top action wise but overall I enjoyed it. What I didn't enjoy was Esme hiding things from her parents and the cops to save her sister's reputation. She's old enough to know that isn't going to work well.

I did see reviewers didn't find it believable that people didn't take the disappearance more seriously. I'd respectfully invite them to watch a week of true crime. Teens Gaia's age are often written off as runaways, more than anyone wants to think of. The stats in America are appalling, over 2000 kids going missing daily and about a million yearly between here and Canada so yeah, that there were police on the case and it not totally ignored was not unbelievable to me.



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