Fragile (The Hollows, #1) by Lisa Unger

  

My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars

Category: Adult
Genre: Mystery, suspense
Content: Strong language; Rape, but nothing is described

 

Everybody knows everybody in The Hollows, a quaint, charming town outside of New York City. It's a place where neighbors keep an eye on one another's kids, where people say hello in the grocery store, and where high school cliques and antics are never quite forgotten. As a child, Maggie found living under the microscope of small-town life stifling. But as a wife and mother, she has happily returned to The Hollows's insular embrace. As a psychologist, her knowledge of family histories provides powerful insights into her patients' lives. So when the girlfriend of her teenage son, Rick, disappears, Maggie's intuitive gift proves useful to the case--and also dangerous.

The investigation has her husband, Jones, the lead detective on the case, acting strangely. Rick, already a brooding teenager, becomes even more withdrawn. In a town where the past is always present, nobody is above suspicion, not even a son in the eyes of his father.

Determined to uncover the truth, Maggie pursues her own leads into Charlene's disappearance and exposes a long-buried town secret--one that could destroy everything she holds dear.

While I liked this book, I felt like there were a few too many elements thrown in. There were too many unsavory characters, too many disappearances or murders. Also I wasn't really sure why the character Charlie was included so much in the story since he had nothing to do with anything except for witnessing something. He felt like a character that needed his own story. Apparently that's a thing this author does in this series though, she intersects different story threads into the books.

The biggest reason I liked this is that I could relate so much to the psychologist as a mom and a wife. The thoughts and feelings she had about her son growing up and changing, in some ways not in the way she wanted him to, really hit home for me. The relationship between her son and husband also really hit home for me. The parenting style she adopted because of it also really hit home for me.

I liked some of the characters in the book, but I also don't really feel compelled to keep reading about any of them. This is mostly a series of companion stories, although the first two books seem to be directly related to each other. If I read any more it would probably be just the first two, but at this time I don't plan on continuing.