"The Missing Girl" by Norma Fox Mazer

This summer, I read the book "The Missing Girl" by Norma Fox Mazer, is about the five Herbert girls: Beauty, Mim, Stevie, Fancy, and Autumn. They live a life that is full of troubles, they aren't financially stable, their father has hurt his back (perhaps forever) and their parents do not know how to deal with it. The girls have their own personal problems too, and you follow the voices of Beauty, Fancy, and Autumn. Beauty feels that she doesn't fit her name, much less fit in with the rest of the girls. Fancy is conveyed as being autistic, and becomes a voice of innocence of naïvety throughout the story. Autumn is the youngest sister, and she goes through her own struggle to be special, not just little.

As the girls go on with their lives and their daily struggles, they do not realize that they are being watched, watched by a nameless man. This man seems ordinary on the outside, normal job, clothes, keeps to himself. He is boring, lives in a house in a field at the end of a road. His house is solitary, he prefers it that way. He has two cats and he loves them very much, but he went through many cats to get to these perfect two. He has them... buried, and has lost count of how many died. His obsession with the girls becomes scary, not because he hurts them, but because they are his source of entertainment, what he revolves his schedule around.

One day, Autumn is taking a walk, and she loses track of where she is going, she loses track of where she is. She ends up near the end of a road, surrounded by a field, only one house in sight. A man is in the front yard, raking leaves, and she goes up to him, asking directions to her house. At first, he says he doesn't know, but, as she walks away, the man says that he has a town map inside, so why doesn't she come in? Autumn decides that it would be rude to say "no", and the man brings her inside and traps her. He reasons that this isn't wrong (sometimes, in the book, you are in his point of view), she walked right in. He is, obviously, very messed up psychologically, which makes him scary in the way his moods change so quickly, as if he were bipolar. 

"The Missing Girl" is a psychological thriller that kept me on edge the whole time I was reading. I wanted to know what happened next and what would happen to the girls. I highly recommend this book, but it isn't for those who can be scared very easily, as it is about a stalker, who seems so regular, seems so innocent, is somebody who could kill a cat without a thought or bit of guilt. I loved the book, and I cannot wait to read another book by her!