I received this book for free from Publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

What if you found evidence of a crime, but no one believed you?

Seventeen-year-old Willow always has a camera around her neck. She volunteers as a photographer at Finding Home, an animal shelter. When Willow stumbles upon a lost camera memory card, it’s filled with hundreds of photos of teenage girls. Some are smiling, others look unaware, and a few seem terrified.

The police tell her taking photos in public isn’t a crime. But Willow can’t seem to let it go, especially after she finds her own photo on the card. So Willow teams up with new volunteer Dare to figure out what happened to the girls. As their investigation heats up, so does the chemistry between them. But everyone around Willow seems to have a secret: Finding Home’s owner, her own mom, and even Dare. When Willow learns that some of the girls on the camera card have gone missing, she realizes the unknown photographer might be a serial killer. Can Willow find him before he finds her?

Short and Sweet Review

When We Go Missing follows our two main characters Willow and Dare as they work at Finding Homes an animal shelter and also try to solve the mystery of a camera memory card that has hundreds of pictures of girls that seem unaware or frightened.

I personally felt this book isn’t what the synopsis is selling it as. I expected it to be more of a mystery but it felt like a majority of the focus was on Willow and Dare working at the animal shelter and trying to get the animals adopted. This book was short and by the time theres a focus on the mystery the book was over so it felt like the pacing was off or there should have just been more attention paid to the mystery. Willow finds this camera memory card and the pictures she finds on it she finds to be alarming so she takes them to the police department and they tell her its nothing but she can’t shake the feeling that something is wrong. There wasn’t a lot of detective work going on, honestly I feel like Willow got lucky that she even figured out what was going on with that memory card. We get the POVs of Willow, Dare, and the person behind taking the pictures. Willow is a dedicated worker and when she feels strongly about something you’ll know it. Dare volunteers at the animal shelter because he needs the community service hours after something he did that we don’t find out until later. When we get the POV of the culprit we can tell he’s a textbook weirdo someone you would see on an episode of criminal minds. I didn’t enjoy this book, I definitely went into it thinking it was going to be one way and I ended up with something completely different. I didn’t even have the time to care about the romance between Willow and Dare because I was too busy looking for the mystery. I did like seeing how Willow and Dare’s home lives were it does explain why Willow spends so much time at the shelter.

Overall, I really didn’t like this book because I feel bamboozled. If this was just a book about two teens working at an animal shelter and had romance that’s fine, but I swear this is being marketed as a mystery and that mystery is on the back burner for most of the book. I wouldn’t recommend this book especially if you’re going into it expecting a mystery but if that’s not important than you may like this book more than I did.