An enjoyable quick read. 2.5 stars. I got this as a Kindle first book, otherwise I don't think I would've read it. It was pretty much as I expected. Abigail, a recent widow and artist, moves to a tiny town to star over. The house she moves into has a past. 30 years ago a single mom and her two kids vanished. Her sister said they left town, but there are mysterious circumstances around their disappearance that the town still talks about. The sister was not very well liked and only died recently. Abigail finds hidden through the house "scraps of paper" with notes written by the kids detailing a miserable life and she begins to suspect foul play. With the help of a handsome, retired cop widower, and some enthusiastic townspeople, she solves the 30 year old mystery.
All the characters were pretty one note. For example, the cop love interest was basically perfect. I kept thinking he was fake and must be the murderer, but this story is much more straight forward than that. In fact, I over thought almost everything instead of just sticking with the obvious (and correct) solutions.
One interesting thing--and I didn't want to give anything away, but I guess I will spoiler tag this review because I want to discuss it--there was a big double standard that I don't think was intentional.
Abigail finds this one guy totally creepy from the get go. She keeps making excuses, however, and even though he makes her uncomfortable, she thinks its her own issue and tries to move past it, despite clear evidence he's lying about what he knows. And other people in town dismiss it, saying there's no way he's the murderer, blah blah blah. But his ex-wife? Everyone is fine saying she's crazy and she's the reason they got divorced, don't believe anything she says. And no one retracts this attitude toward her, even after its revealed that he (of course) was the murderer. It's just weird that people were so quick to judge the ex-wife but made excuses for him. Even Abigail herself made excuses and tried to pretend like he didn't creep her out. I think women do that a lot, instead of following our instincts, we feel we have to be nice to clearly sketchy people.