Product Description

Everybody knows everybody in The Hollows, a quaint, charming town outside of New York City. It’s a place where neighbors keep an eye on one another’s kids, where people say hello in the grocery store, and where high school cliques and antics are never quite forgotten. As a child, Maggie found living under the microscope of small-town life stifling. But as a wife and mother, she has happily returned to The Hollows’s insular embrace. As a psychologist, her knowledge of family histories provides powerful insights into her patients’ lives. So when the girlfriend of her teenage son, Rick, disappears, Maggie’s intuitive gift proves useful to the case—and also dangerous. 

Eerie parallels soon emerge between Charlene’s disappearance and the abduction of another local girl that shook the community years ago when Maggie was a teenager. The investigation has her husband, Jones, the lead detective on the case, acting strangely.  Rick, already a brooding teenager, becomes even more withdrawn.  In a town where the past is always present, nobody is above suspicion, not even a son in the eyes of his father.  

“I know how a moment can spiral out of control,” Jones says to a shocked Maggie as he searches Rick’s room for incriminating evidence. “How the consequences of one careless action can cost you everything.”

As she tries to reassure him that Rick embodies his father in all of the important ways, Maggie realizes this might be exactly what Jones fears most. Determined to uncover the truth, Maggie pursues her own leads into Charlene’s disappearance and exposes a long-buried town secret—one that could destroy everything she holds dear. This thrilling novel about one community’s intricate yet fragile bonds will leave readers asking, How well do I know the people I love? and How far would I go to protect them?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #14096 in eBooks
• Published on: 2010-07-28
• Released on: 2010-08-03
• Format: Kindle eBook
• Number of items: 1

From Publishers Weekly
Set in the Hollows, a secluded town about 100 miles outside New York City, Unger's contemporary thriller offers solid entertainment, but lacks the tension of her 2008 stand-alone, Black Out. Psychologist Maggie Cooper and her husband, Det. Jones Cooper, disagree on how to handle their rebellious son, 17-year-old Rick, who prefers to spend time with his band or holed up with his girlfriend, Charlene Murray. When Charlene disappears one night after a fight with her mother, Maggie and Jones wonder if she ran off to Manhattan, but are reminded of the disappearance 20 years earlier of Sarah Meyers, whose mutilated body was found after she vanished on her way home from school. Though the alleged killer confessed, there are still unanswered questions, and Maggie and Jones find themselves forced to revisit the past as suspicion falls on Rick. Since the Hollows is so small, characters continually rehash secrets--and rumors--so that Unger relies too heavily on the community's interconnectedness to bolster her plot.
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From Booklist
History repeats itself in the cozy suburban enclave of the Hollows when a teenage girl goes missing. Charlene’s disappearance strikes uncomfortably close to home for psychiatrist Maggie and her policeman husband, Jones, opening wounds that go back 20 years to when they, and Charlene’s mother, Melody, were high-school classmates and Maggie’s best friend, Sarah, was found brutally murdered. Jones and Melody carry a secret from that time, one that involves school bully turned town cop Travis Crosby. Now both Maggie and Jones’ son, Ricky, and Travis’ son, Marshall, are prime suspects in Charlene’s disappearance; and while Jones harbors unsettling opinions about Ricky, Maggie knows other disturbing facts about Marshall. As tensions mount with each passing hour that Charlene is gone, the parents must face the truth about the teenagers they were if they are to help the children they themselves have raised. Unger’s taut and edgy tale stealthily plumbs the depths of desperation that grow more dangerous with the passage of time. --Carol Haggas

Review
"[A] nail-biting nuanced whodunit."
--People

"Folks in a small town descend into darkness and revisit long forgotten memories when a young girl disappears....[A] simmering, tragic tale. Fans of authors like Jodi Picoult will want to read this one in a nice comfortable chair...Unger's fans won't be disappointed."
--Associated Press

"This one is a stunner...Unger's genius is in plotting the story so that the reader never knows what's coming next...This is a read that will stay with you."
--New York Journal of Books Review

"Unger skillfully builds suspense by alternating point of view from chapter to chapter...Too many thrillers rely on coincidence or outlandish twists to connect the dots in a crime investigation, but Unger makes that process organic by using the interconnectedness of her characters' lives over the decades -- these people really do know each others' secrets. Even apparently unrelated threads -- like the chapters about the exterminator called in to trap the raccoons in Elizabeth's attic -- are cleverly woven into the plot. Unger is also adept at drawing believable characters and relationships. Much of the emotional weight and considerable tension of Fragile have to do with families, with how parents and their children relate (or don't) and how husbands and wives can think they know everything about each other -- and then find themselves surprised."
--St. Petersburg Times

"If you're a fan of Jodi Picoult's family chronicle storytelling, you'll enjoy Fragile, too... Unger balances nicely the suspense of her missing person story (a layered one when the vanishing of another teenage girl 30 years earlier is connected) with deeper sentiments."
--Milwaukee Journal Sentinel