The Night My Sister Went Missing - Carol Plum-Ucci

If you've read anything by Plum-Ucci before, I'll bet you're hooked on her; she's an amazing writer with an incredible gift for suspense and making the reader think through the possibilities. But she normally kind of still leaves you hanging at the end of her books. Not in a bad way, necessarily, but it does drive ya a little nuts. Knowing this, I was ready for the same kind of book, and in some respects it is like her others, the suspense is amazing, but in the end she solves the problem which I was pleasantly surprised by. This story takes place almost entirely in one night, when Kurt Carmody and his sister Casey are out on a pier in New Jersey with a bunch of friends (where none of them, of course, are supposed to be) and a gunshot rings out. Casey disappears into the water, and she never comes up. Kurt, of course, blames himself for even letting her go up there, let alone passing around the little gun like everyone else did instead of throwing it right off the pier.

Kurt spends this night in the police station because they won't let him go anywhere else ( his parents are out of town for the weekend) and while there he and a friend spy on the questioning of the other kids who were there, most of whom seem to be pointing a finger at Stacy Kearny, a rich girl who lives on the island who was, in fact, the owner of the now missing gun. No one seems to know why she bought the gun, and this is one of the mysteries that unfolds throughout the book, adding an interesting plot twist. Plum-Ucci has a way of using this topic of a missing person (she's done it in all of her novels I think) to write about how teens treat one another in a way that gets readers to really think about things like prejudice, loyalty and cruelty. I think she's hoping that maybe some kids who read her books won't make the same mistakes the characters in her novels do.

I don't think this is her best novel, for that you should try What Happened to Lani Garver, but it's definitely a good read and I'll be ordering it for our library to go with the rest of her novels very soon.