With her 2022 Edgar- and Lefty-award winning mystery, “Like a Sister,” Kellye Garrett established a knack for mining the zeitgeist for anxiety and suspense. In her new social thriller, Garrett probes the phenomenon known as “missing white woman syndrome,” in which, as the late PBS news anchor Gwen Ifill noted, “If there is a missing white woman, you’re going to cover that every day” — and deftly updates it for the digital age.
“Missing White Woman” actually centers a young Black woman. A stationery store manager from Maryland who once dreamt of practicing law, Breanna Wright (Bree) is thrilled to spend a weekend away with Ty Franklin, her boyfriend of three months. Ensconced in a four-story luxury row house with “unobstructed views of the Manhattan skyline” after a decade of struggle and singlehood, Bree’s happiness is more about her boyfriend’s warmth and caring than the trappings of luxury. To Bree, Ty is not just “the first decent guy I’d dated in a decade.” He’s the kind of man she could easily fall in love with: sexy, affectionate, and ambitious, with a fast-track, crypto-related finance position at Wall Street powerhouse JP Morgan. Even working too much, “with the bags under his eyes, he was divine.”
On the last day of her romantic getaway, a dead body — that of a young, blond, and formerly beautiful white woman — throws a wrench into that idyll. Bree wakes up to find a bloody scene in the foyer of their townhouse, and Ty gone.
With that nightmare scenario, Garrett launches two intertwined narratives. One explores what happens to a Black woman caught in the fury of missing white woman syndrome in the time of social media; the second involves the shadow investigation Bree launches when the world focuses their suspicion on her and Ty. This two-pronged approach redirects attention and care from the archetypal white woman of the title and onto Bree and Ty’s treatment in the justice system and the court of public opinion.
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It’s a tasty cocktail, but the ingredients prove hard to balance. With humor and pathos, Garrett’s writing exposes the dynamics of race as media narratives careen out of control. The mystery is intriguing, but slower to unfold, with provocative twists that I wished I had encountered earlier.
Bree’s history makes her particularly vulnerable in this crisis. She grew up wanting to be a lawyer “like her dad.” That feeling intensified after his death left 10-year-old Bree with an anxious, grieving mother. When Bree got into trouble her sophomore year in college for possession of marijuana she didn’t own and resisting arrest during a traffic stop, it was a second strike in her mother’s eyes (the first was attending a lesser known, predominantly Black college rather than an Ivy). That brush with the law and custodial sentence for something so many white kids partake in but rarely get arrested for took a toll on Bree’s mental health and her grades. It also brought her relationship with childhood bestie turned roommate, Adore Smith, to an abrupt and painful end.
Having lost so much for a crime she didn’t commit and been abandoned when she most needed support, Bree is hard-wired to keep the faith about Ty.
Still, the optics aren’t good: a body badly beaten, Bree the sole witness to either a tragic fall or a brutal murder. Her moment by moment narration of discovering the body is one of the book’s most striking passages: “I was so focused on trying to manifest good vibes only, I didn’t notice the shoe until I was midway down... Red sole, so at first I thought it was the work of some designer. But then I realized it was blood.” Gruesomely, “[e]ven from a flight up, the blood looked deep enough to swim in. It wasn’t a pool so much as a river trailing from her head.”
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Seeing through Bree’s eyes, we’re hit with the incongruence of Bree’s romantic expectations and this harsh reality. In a wealthy white neighborhood populated by a horde of would-be Karens, she’s under tremendous pressure. That peril intensifies with the involvement of social media influencers. The dead woman is almost surely dog walker Janelle Beckett, an active fan of one of social media’s most prominent TikTok accounts, “A Brush with Billie.”
As Billie turns Janelle’s disappearance into a cause celebre, toxic influencer and true-crime culture merge. The police find themselves barraged by Billie’s minions, who are determined to find the real truth (or jump to facile conclusions) for themselves. They mistrust and disparage Bree on instinct, and dig into her past with a vengeance. When a seemingly incriminating part of Ty’s history comes to light online, because, as Bree puts it, “some woman who’d rather put on makeup than get a job had posted his Instagram handle,” it’s a perfect commentary on Bree’s very modern, social media-fueled crisis.
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A best-selling and award-winning author, Garrett’s mastery of character and wry social observation shine bright in the eye of this storm, even if her protagonist is both sympathetic and deeply frustrating. Bree thinks she’s been hardened by tough times and betrayal, but she can be gullible, not just about the body in the foyer but also about the injustice she suffered in college.
And though she is determined to save herself and find her boyfriend, Bree is painfully slow on the uptake. Though deliciously twisty, the pacing of the mystery follows her lead. Context and character building take precedence, so it’s not until the final quarter that the sleuthing really flows. Till then, this is a heroine who does not have a clue. At the same time, the scenario feels terrifyingly realistic. Who could say, faced with similar blows, we’d jump into action any quicker?
MISSING WHITE WOMAN
by Kellye Garrett
Mulholland, 336 pp., $29
Carole V. Bell is a Jamaican-born writer, critic, and media researcher.