Book Pick for February 2026
I was all excited this month for one particular book. It was not this one. Rather, it was the new Colleen Hoover book, Woman Down, that I was hoping would suck me in like her book Verity did. I was not as enthralled as I had hoped as it was less of a suspense genre and fit more in romance. However, sneaking into my queue was the latest Mary Kubica novel, It’s Not Her. I must give props to Kubica who has really grown in her craft as her writing career has grown. Her novels are definitely typical modern suspense; however, her knowledge of midwestern local color is spot on giving them an eerie verisimilitude for readers from the area. I found It’s Not Her especially alluring at this moment because it is set at a resort in rural Wisconsin. In the middle of February in Minnesota, the only respite from the daily grind and miserable weather is dreaming of those lazy, hazy summer days paddling around the lake.
Told from alternate viewpoints of Reese, a teenager who has gone missing, and her surviving aunt, Courtney, who is on the search for missing niece the book begins after Reese’s younger sister, upon returning home from Courtney’s where she spent the night with her cousin, Cass, finds her parents dead and sister missing. Courtney and her husband are thrust into the search to save Reese as Courtney not only deals with the loss of her brother and his wife, but becomes the ward of Reese’s remaining siblings, ten-year-old Mae and fourteen-year-old Wyatt.
Reese’s narration of the events leading up to her disappearance brought back memories of those years in middle school (for me) when I didn’t always want to be on those “family” vacations. Within this we learn of her ended relationship with a best friend back home and secret trysts with one of the young employees at the lodge the families are staying at.
During the investigation the small town’s past emerges that includes another missing girl. In addition to the digital footprint of Reese in her last known days as it is tracked emerges, stories begin to overlap and theories and suspicions around Courtney’s own family begin. The cast of small-town suspects, including Reese’s romantic interest who has also mysteriously disappeared, also linger on the fringe of the case. As time elapses, the plot becomes more and more convoluted.
When the truth comes to Courtney at last the story is nothing she would believe. And maybe shouldn’t have…
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