The Good Girl: An Adrenaline-Filled Bestseller by Mary Kubica

Book Cover of The Good Girl

Ron Goulart

Book Cover of “The Good Girl”

Jordan Miller, Acting Editor-in-Chief

Mary Kubica’s bestselling novel, The Good Girl, is a novel that may replace Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl in the mother of all plot twists.

I began the book as the result of an offhand comment made to me by a friend, and considered it a mere pleasure read. However, once I approached the meat of the novel, I became enraptured by the complexities of Kubica’s characters- and what seemed to be their hidden motives.

The Good Girl begins with Eve Dennett, a mother of two twenty-something women and wife of a prominent Chicago judge, getting a call: her daughter Mia had not shown up for work that morning. Thinking at first it was something simple, Eve gets sent into overdrive once she is told this is not something her estranged daughter has ever done according to her closest friend.

Eventually, the viewpoint of the novel shifts to Detective Gabe Hoffman, who is assigned the Mia Dennett case. He gets to know Mia’s father, Judge Dennett, who is revealed to be a quite conceited and selfish man. Hoffman works closely with Eve Dennett throughout the book, slowly unraveling the details of Mia Dennett’s disappearance as he gets to know more about the conflicts among the members of the Dennett family.

The final viewpoint is that of Colin Thatcher, one of those involved in Mia’s disappearance. As I got to know the character, I gained more and more respect for him- respect that would not have existed if not for his inner demons closely examined by the chapters from his point of view. This character’s viewpoint was the one that was the most suspenseful- the one that continued to leave me hanging on the last words of his chapters.

Most viewpoints have a ‘before’ and ‘after’ section: before Mia is found, and after. After Mia is found, she is completely inconsolable. She will barely speak, eat, or leave her childhood bedroom. Mia also has acquired selective amnesia as a result of her stressful ordeal. This makes it even harder for the Dennett family to return back to normal- and impossible for Mia to return to her own life.

Once The Good Girl gets to the tense moments of Mia’s disappearance, the book was impossible to put down. Constantly the chapters left me hanging, so I just had to continue reading through the next few in order to find out what happened from that character’s point of view. Though the book had my heart racing, it was also extremely emotional at some points. The last few chapters capture a revelation so shocking and heartbreaking, I had to read them over multiple times to convince myself the truth of what had just happened.

Kubica certainly is on her way to becoming the next big crime novelist, and with movie-rights deals already signed to the film company Anonymous Content- which produced the films The Revenant and Winter’s Bone– I can’t wait to see the story of Mia Dennett’s disappearance unfold on the big screen.