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Fragile

A Novel

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

A thrilling novel from New York Times bestselling author Lisa Unger about the hunt for a missing girl and one community’s intricate yet fragile bonds.
“[A] nail-biting nuanced whodunit.”—People
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. 
Eerie parallels soon emerge between Charlene’s disappearance and the abduction of another local girl that shook the community years ago when Maggie was a teenager. 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 Rick, already a brooding teenager, becomes even more withdrawn.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.  
As she tries to reassure him that Rick embodies his father in all of the important ways, Maggie realizes this might be exactly what Jones fears most. 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.

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    • AudioFile Magazine
      Nancy Linari's delivery is seductive as she slowly unfurls the layers of this tale of simmering tension and dark secrets. Her perfect delivery, with its sweetness of tone and impeccable timing, soon has you mesmerized as she skillfully leads you farther and farther off the trail and away from the lights. With tight plotting, the author doles out snippets of each character as bit by bit you find out about the missing girl, the package that ends up in the quarry, the slight smell of death in an attic. It's her ability to keep listeners dancing on the hook that grabs the gut. Linari plays it for all she can--deceiving you over and over and making you love it. D.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      June 21, 2010
      Set in the Hollows, a secluded town about 100 miles outside New York City, Unger's contemporary thriller offers solid entertainment, but lacks the tension of her 2008 stand-alone, Black Out. Psychologist Maggie Cooper and her husband, Det. Jones Cooper, disagree on how to handle their rebellious son, 17-year-old Rick, who prefers to spend time with his band or holed up with his girlfriend, Charlene Murray. When Charlene disappears one night after a fight with her mother, Maggie and Jones wonder if she ran off to Manhattan, but are reminded of the disappearance 20 years earlier of Sarah Meyers, whose mutilated body was found after she vanished on her way home from school. Though the alleged killer confessed, there are still unanswered questions, and Maggie and Jones find themselves forced to revisit the past as suspicion falls on Rick. Since the Hollows is so small, characters continually rehash secrets—and rumors—so that Unger relies too heavily on the community's interconnectedness to bolster her plot.

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  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

Languages

  • English

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