It's Not Her: A Twisty Thriller about Two Families and a Chilling Lake Resort Crime from the Author of Local Woman Missing

Courtney Gray’s family vacation at a quiet lakeside resort turns horrifying when she discovers her brother and sister-in-law murdered in their cottage, while her teenage niece Reese has vanished without a trace. What begins as a brutal family tragedy quickly expands into something darker, with buried tensions, fractured relationships, and unsettling secrets rising to the surface. Suspense builds around not just who is responsible, but what really happened to Reese and how far people will go to hide the truth. Wow wow wow. I feel so bamboozled in the best possible way. I thought I knew what happened and where this book was going and then I didn’t. Rinse and repeat that for the entire book. You literally DO NOT know the truth at all, no matter how much you think you do. My favorite part was the alternating timelines of what happens after the incident and what happens in the days leading up to it. Both perspectives come together to give you a fully baked pie of suspense, slowly revealing how everything connects. I love Mary Kubica, so much. This book is wild. Read it if you can.

Mary Kubica has done it again! What a great read that was! I totally got it wrong and the twist was amazing! I will say this book made me sad, reading about the family dynamics! Reading the complexity of each person's personality and going through life! I highly recommend reading!

Mary Kubica's It's Not Her takes a quiet lakeside vacation and turns it into a spiral of suspicion, secrets, and people making truly terrible decisions. Courtney walks into the aftermath of her brother and sister-in-law’s murder. One teenager is missing. The entire town feels like it knows more than it’s saying. I flew through this. The tension is there from the start. Kubica knows exactly how to keep you questioning everyone. I changed my mind about who was responsible more times than I can count. Red herrings were everywhere. Some worked and others felt like they were thrown in just to keep me guessing. The characters tested my patience. Courtney spends a lot of the book in full panic mode. The story depends so heavily on her perspective. I needed her to take a breath at least once. Her anxiety made it harder to stay connected to her. Courtney's family dynamics are messy! Secrets are stacked on secrets because people are protecting themselves at any cost. The twists come fast at the end. Maybe too fast. The story holds back key information making the final reveals feel less like a payoff and more like a last-minute scramble to shock the reader. I wanted a cleaner build up to that final twist. Give me the clues and let me piece it together. Also, some of these plot choices? Wild. Kids making life-ruining accusations to cover their tracks had me staring at the wall for a second. The moral lines in this book are blurry at best and nonexistent at worst. The audiobook really saved this experience for me. Jennifer Jill Araya, Brittany Pressley, and Gary Tiedemann carry the tension and give each perspective a distinct voice. They made it easy to stay engaged. Even when the story started to lose me. It’s Not Her had me flipping theories every five minutes and side-eyeing every character in sight. That kind of momentum is hard to pull off! Kubica nails it for most of the book. I wish the ending trusted the buildup instead of relying on one last wave of twists. It's Not Her is a solid pick for readers who love being kept on their toes. As long as you don’t look too closely at how everything fits together.

Love the story and plot twists!

Enjoyed this book but it wasn't until 75% in that it became a page turner for me. I enjoyed the plot itself and definitely didn't see the ending coming so that was good. My biggest reason I gave it a 7 was because it felt like it took so long to get there. I feel like several chapters could have been cut out