Missing Mom
This is a dual timeline mystery told from the viewpoints of two high school seniors, one in the present day and one nineteen years in the past. Well-written and fast-paced, the novel addresses issues that would be challenging for adults to deal with, let alone teenagers.
The novel opens with seventeen-year-old Noelle at her after-school dance class. She receives a call from the day camp her six-year-old sister Whitney attends, saying their mother didn’t show up to pick up Whitney as she normally would. Noelle goes to get her sister, but she’s certain something must be wrong. When their mother still doesn’t appear later that night, Noelle reports the disappearance to police. Their stepfather, and their father who the girls see on most weekends, are also worried.
After days of searching and public appeals, police report that the mother’s clothes have been found at a beach, with a note saying “I’m sorry.” The conclusion: she committed suicide. But Noelle doesn’t believe her mom would ever have taken her own life. She undertakes her own investigation to find out what really happened.
Noelle’s chapters are interspersed with another story line taking place nineteen years earlier, told from Savannah’s point of view. Against her parents’ wishes, Savannah married her boyfriend right after high school. To her dismay, she discovers her new husband is controlling and becomes increasingly abusive.
In the present, while trying to find her mother, Noelle is also dealing with growing romantic feelings for Ravi, her best friend and fellow dancer. And she’s worried about Whitney, who won’t share why she doesn’t want to be alone with their father. And it seems that their mother had a murky past that she kept secret.
Noelle and Savannah are intelligent and relatable characters, confronting situations which would be a huge challenge at any age. The solutions they find are not easy. This is a book that will stay with you after you finish reading.
Lynn Slaughter grew up in New York and Connecticut and graduated from Smith with a degree in sociology. But her first love was dance. She had a long career as a professional dancer and dance educator. She ended up chairing the dance department at a performing arts high school, and for many years was involved with summer programs for high school students gifted in the arts.
Combining her two areas of expertise, she published several articles for parenting magazines about the challenges of adolescence. After retiring she decided to try her hand at writing fiction, publishing her first young adult novel, While I Danced, in 2013. That got her hooked on fiction, and she returned to school to earn an MFA in Writing Popular Fiction. Since then she has published five more novels. Missing Mom (2025) is the most recent, and she has another in the works.
She has two grown sons and five grandchildren, and lives in Louisville, Kentucky with her husband and cat Lucy.