Just Finished Reading Missing Person by Sarah Lotz

I follow Stephen King on Twitter...there are pros and cons to this as the great popular fiction author of our time tends to get a bit sidetracked railing against Trump.  I'm more interested in his take on the world of literature, and sometimes he recommends books he has just read.  Sarah Lotz's 2019 thriller novel Missing Person is one of these that he has recently extolled, so I managed to check it out online from my library and just finished reading it.  Here are my reactions...

A killer in their midst...this is revealed up front as an online group of amateurs investigating unidentified dead across the country focus on a murder victim in Minnesota, while in a separate story Sean, a young gay man in Ireland, searches for his uncle, which his relatives had shunned and claimed had dies years before but in fact had emigrated to America.  Where is Uncle Ted...and the online sleuths have their own mystery, about the Boy in the Dress: who is he?  Connecting both stories is the murderer, who has infiltrated the group in order to keep up with their progress.  It's suspenseful and revealing as the investigators have their own personal lives and stories...as well as Sean and the killer: Lotz alternately presents their different perspectives on the developing story their lives begin to converge toward an inevitable climax at the end.  And that ending isn't what I expected, usually a plus.  I agree with Stephen King that this was a good story...very impressive character development as well as a sense of empathy on the author's part as to their personalities and motivations.  Go see if you agree with me.  By the way, King has just come out with a book of novellas titled If It Bleeds and I checked it out as well, in the process of reading story #1, titled Mr. Harrigan's Phone...