Born a mere three minutes apart, Penny and Nix were inseparable. The twins looked nearly identical, but their personalities couldn’t have been more different. Penny was the cautious one, always doing the right thing, making the logical choice, playing it safe. Nix was the wild one, unafraid to go against the grain simply because she could. As close as they were, their bond would end in tragedy. Nix succumbed to addiction, overdosing far too young, leaving behind only a cryptic voicemail and a hole in Penny that she would spend the rest of her life trying to fill.
“In the space between dreams and the waking world, I felt her with me, sleeping as we often had, turned toward each other like a closed set of parentheses.”
As if trying to keep her sister alive through imitation, Penny begins to abandon her lifelong caution. She ends her steady relationship with the man who would have made a perfectly safe husband. She quits her job in the culinary world. She enrolls in the police academy. And that’s where we first meet her—on her final shift as a police trainee, called to the scene of a brutal murder.
The blood shocks her. The violence overwhelms her. She struggles to comprehend how one person could do this to another human soul. But then Penny recognizes the victim—one of the men she holds responsible for Nix’s death—and another emotion cuts through the horror. Satisfaction. A quiet, unsettling sense that this man met the end he deserved.
Shaken, Penny steps away to catch her breath and stumbles upon a blonde woman drenched in the blood of that victim, gripping a box cutter. Before Penny can make the arrest, the woman calmly reveals that this murder is only the beginning. It's part of a much larger story that is far from over. A story about sisters. A story that Penny now finds herself a part of.
And then, just like that, the killer disappears, leaving Penny to decide how far she’s willing to go to see this story through to the end.
Joshilyn Jackson has long thrilled me with her inventive standalone novels that balance page-turning suspense with sharp, emotionally grounded character work. Missing Sister is yet another example of that skill. I’ll admit it’s a bit darker than her previous books, and it took me a few chapters to fully get behind Penny as a character. She’s complicated in her motivations, walking a thin line between her naturally cautious nature and her late sister’s more reckless, daring spirit. She makes frustratingly poor decisions at times, and it can be tough to watch her spiral into self-destruction. But at the same time, that’s grief, isn’t it? It pushes us toward choices we might never otherwise make.
Jackson populates the story with characters who feel authentic to the world she’s built, each wrestling with their own complicated relationship to Nix, whose shadow stretches over everyone she touched. All of it comes together in a tightly plotted, page-turning thriller with a twist ending I genuinely didn’t see coming. Sure, there are a few moments that require a small leap of faith, but I was so invested in the characters that I hardly minded. It’s a dark, fast read that proves Jackson isn’t afraid to explore new tonal territory. Missing Sister is another strong entry in her catalog and a reminder of why I keep coming back to her books.
For more information, visit the author's website, Amazon, and Goodreads.
(2026, 18)
