Breakaway Books

Authored by Thrity Umrigar; Published January 2026; Thriller

⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️

Missing Sam is about a lot more than a missing person. Parental estrangement, Islamophobia in America, the modern-day difficulties of gay marriage—it’s all in this thriller about an abducted woman.

In Missing Sam, the titular woman has no idea that a minor fight with her wife will have consequences that ripple across their lives forever. Alone on a run the morning after the squabble, trying to shake off its effects, Sam trips, hits her head, and, while unconscious, is kidnapped. Ali frantically works with the police to find her for over a month, but the real challenge begins when Sam is released and returns home. How can she deal with the trauma? Will this event manage to repair their relationships with their families?

I was surprised by this novel, which I assumed would be largely about Sam’s abduction and recovery through the intrepid inquiries of her wife Ali. When Sam is returned only a third of the way through the book, through (spoiler alert) no effort of Ali’s, I didn’t know what to expect, and I’m not sure the author had a clear vision of what the rest of the novel was meant to impart. Many of the remaining pages are about the reparation of the estrangement that San and Ali had suffered from their parents when they got married, and I couldn’t help but wonder why a book centered on a kidnapping pivots so substantially to this subject. It doesn’t fit quite comfortably with the beginning of the book, or at least not as neatly as the other major subject: the racism and Islamophobia that Ali encounters when Sam is being held captive. It is obvious—and depressing—that without a white partner, Ali encounters far worse racism than before. She immediately comes under suspicion in social and traditional media. It is truly upsetting that I found it so believable in twenty-first century America. 

The moments in which I felt like the author was clearly speaking through her characters about her political beliefs are my least favorite of the whole novel. I love when a novel conveys a message, and the racism that Ali encounters is horrendous, but I strongly dislike when I feel like I am being preached at. I applaud the author, however, for her realistic portrayal of what it’s like to get a person back from the brink of death: Trauma does not have an easy road to recovery, and it’s not all rainbows and butterflies even when a person is saved from a horrific crime. Finally, a warning: If you don’t want to read a COVID novel, know that this book has just a bit of it at the end. It definitely snuck up on me that I was watching the very early days of the pandemic unfold.

Missing Sam is not the thriller I would choose as a mindless beach read, but if you are looking for something with a little more societal commentary, this may very well fit the bill!