[Review] The Girl Who Went Missing - Ace Varkey

Title of Book: The Girl Who Went Missing
Author: Ace Varkey
Publisher: Mysterious East
Publication Year: 2015
Language: English
Format: ebook
Pages: 245

When June Warner arrives in India to visit her sister Thalia, a trip to take her mind off her jilted engagement, she is greeted by the bright hot chaos of Mumbai but not her sister. She goes to the YMCA where Thalia is staying, only to find that she is not there.

Convinced that Thalia’s no-show is a sign that she is in danger, June begins a desperate search for her younger sister.

Police Commissioner Oscar D'Costa, scarred by the tragedies of his past, swears he will never again ignore his gut instinct when it comes to a missing girl. And with more and more dead foreign women being found in his precinct, he becomes convinced a conspiracy is at play.

Through the two worlds of American naiveté and Indian chaos, they must find the girl who went missing.

Thank you to the author, Ace Varkey, for sending me a copy of this book.

The Girl Who Went Missing is a crime/mystery novel about June, who travels to India to visit her sister, Thalia. Upon arriving in India, she doesn’t see Thalia at the airport or the YWCA where she stays. Worried, June then seeks information to find her sister. Being in a foreign country alone with no knowledge of how the things work in the country, it starts to get intense from there. 

This book is set in India, mostly Mumbai, which I’ve never been to. But I think Varkey did a good job in describing the setting in this book. Although I don’t know exactly how the city of Mumbai looks like, but it almost feel like I was there. 

I had a hard time getting into this book. This book is structured with chapters that represent days when the events happen. Each chapter consists of sections that represent places where the story takes place. It was confusing at first. This book has a lot of characters with names that I can hardly remember. The story keeps jumping around from one character to another so it was confusing for me. But once I get used to the characters and the setting, I didn’t find it as confusing as I first read it.

The Girl Who Went Missing talks about tough issues such as kidnapping, prostitution, and human trafficking. I like reading this type of books, mystery novel with serious issues. I usually do not have any problem reading book with tough issues but I do not know why I feel uncomfortable reading this book. The author does not sugarcoat anything. This book covers both the good side and the bad side of Mumbai which is good actually. So maybe it is just me.

There are typos like ‘ppprickling’ and ‘gggirl’ but that’s all that I could find. I like the last half part of this book. That’s when the investigation and the revealing starts bit by bit. At the start of the book, we don’t know what happened to the sister or what is going on. It was not obvious what the crime is which I think makes the mystery aspect of this book intriguing. Overall, it was a suspenseful read. If you like mystery novels, you might want to check this book out.