Missing Clarissa is one of those stories that is exciting, page turning and relatable. Why does everyone love a dead girl? And what was so special about Clarissa that 20 years later 2 teens want to do a school project on her??

This YA thriller/suspense story caught my eye right away with the setting. I love when a story takes place in the state I live in because I can imagine the people, the places and just the whole feel of the book better. Missing Clarissa takes place on the coast of Washington in the small town of Oreville (fictional city). For a journalism project, Blair and her friend Cam decide to do a podcast and focus their research on the unsolved missing person case of Clarissa Campbell who went missing 20 years ago from a high school party. She was a cheerleader and the person that apparently everyone loved. Who would want to do anything to this seemingly perfect teenage girl?

Blair and Cam start the podcast knowing very little about their subject and her story, but once they start researching a little bit and interviewing different people from that time, they soon get more involved with the whole case and are not only looking for a good grade. Now they want to find out what happened to Clarissa and who killed her (because they just know she is not just missing).

I really enjoyed the fact that these teens took the idea of a podcast and made it their project. A little murder mystery for teens was a great way to combine the podcast and a high school assignment to give it a bit more excitement. It was the perfect setting with interesting suspects that leave you wanting to believe a certain someone did it. Although I guessed the culprit as soon as they were introduced, it was still entertaining to see these 2 teens put all the pieces together and solve something that even the police couldn't do 2o years prior.

The story wasn't perfect and neither were the 2 main characters, but that's what made the story fun and me wanting to keep turning those pages. These girls had a good connection and the way they worked together as friends and supported one another to succeed, even when they made poor decisions made me like them even more.

If you enjoy YA murder mysteries or even unsolved mystery podcasts, I think you'll enjoy this book. It is a solid debut and I'm excited to see what Ripley Jones will come up with next.

I was in for a young adult fix and this definitely suited my fancy. As a pair of students team together to produce a true crime podcast for their class, they unbury more than meets the eye when they take a new look into the disappearance of a local girl from years ago. As they develop their podcast, and meet with community members who were in the area when Clarissa went missing, they uncover salacious acts of misdeeds by trusted community members, and become one popular podcast to watch out for. As it seems they come closer to finding out the truth, friends and family try to dissuade them from continuing on before they themselves go missing. I love a true crime podcast story line and I feel as if the characters were interesting enough to keep me engaged. While not the most detailed plot line, I feel as if it was age appropriate and definitely kept you turning the pages. I enjoy the story and look forward to more by this author.

Clarissa Campbell disappeared in 1999 with no explanation, and hasn’t been seen since. Police never figured out what happened to her, and the town of Oreville, Washington hasn’t been the same since her disappearance. Since then, she has turned into a bit of an urban legend.

Twenty years later, high school juniors Blaire and Cameron decide to take on her disappearance for a high school journalism project: a true crime podcast. Determined to find out what happened to Clarissa, they start investigating her disappearance. Their investigation uncovers a slew of small town secrets. And there’s one that just might put them in danger…

Thanks to Wednesday Books and NetGalley for an advanced copy of Missing Clarissa by Ripley Jones to review! Teens and adults alike love a good mystery, so this book is sure to get a lot of buzz! Especially when one of the comp titles is A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder.

For me, the mystery was the best part of this book. While the clues to what happened to Clarissa are pretty in your face, if you’re not paying attention, you might miss it. The pace of the book definitely picks up towards the end, as things snowball pretty quickly when Blair and Cam think they’re onto something. As mysteries usually do.

This book is pitched as a podcast book, but I wish that the podcast sections read more like a podcast transcript. Since podcasts are generally conversations between people, that would have made them read more like podcasts than monologues. However, you still get important information in them, and you get to see some interesting characters throughout.

The point of view of the book also threw me off a bit. Blair and Cam did have distinctive voices, but the third person made it difficult to gauge who’s mind we were in at certain times. Maybe more obvious chapters throughout would have helped.

All in all, if you’re a fan of fast-paced, true crime mysteries, you’ll definitely want to pick this up when it comes out in March!

3.5 stars rounded up to 4.
This was a really fun YA mystery! I love a good podcast trope and this was a welcome addition to the genre, perfect for fans of AGGGTM!
Cam and Blair are best friends who decide to investigate their town's most notorious cold case for a project in their journalism class. In 1999, Clarissa Campbell got into a fight with her football star boyfriend, then disappeared and hasn't been seen since. What starts out as a school project and a fun way to earn some notoriety turns into something else entirely when they realize they might actually be able to solve it.
Despite my normal dislike for long chapters, I found myself flying through the pages of this one. It read easily and kept my interest, even without many big plot twists. The only thing that kept it from being five stars for me were the characters. Cam was just too obnoxious and frustrating for me to root for, and most of the others fell flat. This is definitely a plot-driven story, but that was okay by me and enough to hold my attention.
Special thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a free, electronic ARC of this novel received in exchange for an honest review.

DNF @11%

This book is annoying me already. The writing is terrible, the characters are annoying and don't have personalities. The podcast is an ok idea, but very poorly executed.

Okay, so, I really hope that actual teenage girls aren't out there solving dangerous crimes via podcast as often as it happens in YA literature. Because there were many moments in this book when I literally shook my head and said "why would you do that???" out loud. Blair and Cam are best friends in a very small town in Washington state, and Cam basically bullies Blair into agreeing to do a podcast as a journalism class project. They focus on Clarissa Campbell, a popular girl who went to their high school and mysteriously disappeared in the summer of 1999, never to be seen again. While I definitely found this readable, I struggled with the way the third person narration worked. It took me a while to figure out what wasn't quite working for me, but I think it was the sort of omniscient narration that pinged back and forth between knowing what Blair was thinking/feeling and knowing what Cam was thinking/feeling. Also, Cam was an interesting protagonist because she was kind of a bully who seemed to care very little about how her actions impacted the people important to her, like Blair and her own mom. I guess maybe that's just how teenagers are? I think I would put this in the same general category as The Good Girl's Guide to Murder, but I don't think it's quite as effective as that series. Still, a quick and entertaining read that explores some of the issues with true crime/podcast culture and its harms.

Missing Clarissa is a phenomenal YA thriller from start to finish. Ripley Jones really knows what he's doing. If you enjoy true crime podcasts, this is a perfect thriller to get your hands on. Filled to the brim with twists and a captivating plot, this one is sure to keep readers hooked. The characters are well-developed. The story is incredibly fast-paced. This is one not to be missed! Highly recommended! Be sure to check out Missing Clarissa today.

Cam and Blair are in high school and have to choose a project for their journalism class. The disappearance of Clarissa Campbell 20 years ago is an unsolved mystery that put Orville(their town)on the map for all the wrong reasons. So many people have searched for the truth, but no more is known about what happened to Clarissa. This is the topic that they choose.
Have Cam and Blair ever done a podcast? Nope. They also haven’t figured out an unsolved mystery, but that doesn’t stop them. Two very different friends, each with their own skill set who somehow manage to work well together.
This was a quick read that I started and finished in a day. I kind of figured from the description that these two would find Clarissa, either dead or alive. I mean they had to right or what’s the point. Cam gets first prize for making the most awful decisions(for someone so book smart, she was pretty lacking in street smarts), and yet she still might figure out this mystery.
If you enjoy YA combined with a very old unsolved crime and a quirky main character(Cam),this book seemed to just turn the pages by itself. The killer wasn’t a surprise based on my amateur sleuth guesses(yeah me) butI was still interested to figure out the why.

Definitely a good read, and not the way I thought it would end. It gave me a good girls guide to murder vibes. Definitely worth the read! loved it!

Thank you, Netgalley and Publisher, for this Arc!!

This book was so unexpected for me. I thought I would be going into this obsessing over a new teen murder/mystery. However, what I loved most out of this story were the incredible characters, particularly Cam.

Cam and Blair are best friends, so when their favorite class, journalism, has a huge project, they (mostly Cam) decide on a podcast about a girl that's been missing for 20 years. This leads to some awkward reporting, both of them learning together their strengths and weaknesses pertaining to this project, and, of course, many secrets revealed.

I loved the relationship between Cam and Blair. The overwhelming kindness and honest love between two best friends who are opposites in so many ways was absolutely endearing. Cam is not great communicating with people, she's honest, she's honest to a point that can at times be detrimental. But her honesty is what made me really love this book. The compassion Blair shows, being caring and very uplifting for Cameron, simply made my heart grow.

The last part of this book was a whirlwind. I could not read fast enough. The story around the podcast and Clarissa seemed to be moving slowly, but the last several chapters were explosive.

I loved this book and recommend it to fans of ya mystery/thriller reads!

Out March 7, 2023!

I started out liking this, but the awkward writing got so bad by the end and the characters' choices so absurd, that I was taken totally out of it. The way Jones constantly just out-loud described people ("white guy" was used ad nauseum here) was so strange, not because of representation or lack thereof but because it was just... a descriptor every time a character was introduced. It was lazy.

I'm always down for a YA-murder-podcast-thriller, but I'll admit the POV shifting was a bit dizzying for me as a reader. This book does have one of the best prologues I've read in a long time, though. It was a gorgeous way to set the scene and raise the stakes.

I love a good YA murder mystery. I’ve read probably over 50 of these at this point but for some reason, they just never get old. I don’t know why YA murder mysteries are so entertaining but they just hit different.

The case of the missing Clarissa Campbell went viral in 1999 and her case is on every true crime and conspiracy theory forum. Despite the general public’s obsession, she is never found dead or alive. Twenty years later, two teens from the same rural town think that they can uncover what happened by digging into the secrets of their small town.

What I like about this book is that these girls are not anything extraordinary. They are the epitome of regular high school girls. They could not be more normal or more naive. Having two extremely normal and unremarkable girls attempt to solve a 20 year old murder mystery and actually get somewhere kind of reaffirms that anyone can do anything lol. I liked that these girls weren’t super smart, super good at solving cases, or anything other than ordinary. In fact, Cam makes the absolute stupidest decisions, like confronting a killer on her own and walking right into their home knowing they’re the killer, and also telling no one else who the killer is or that she going to confront them at their home. These girls truly are just high schoolers with the classic teenage mindset of bad decision making and thinking they’re invincible. This makes this book much more relatable than the Truly Devious books, for example.

I personally enjoyed this book much more than A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder or the Truly Devious books. The plot was more interesting and it was a much more fun read. This was a fun way to pass a couple of hours.

Thank you to Netgalley and Wednesday Books for sending me an advanced copy in return for my honest review.

“None of us saw Clarissa leave the party. And none of us saw her again.”

Clarissa Campbell had the perfect life- she was beautiful, a cheerleader and had the football player boyfriend everyone wanted. That is until she disappeared from the forest one August night in 1999. No one knows what happened to her. No body was ever found and no one was charged, but everyone knows she’s dead. We’ve all heard the stories, there’s no other outcome.

Fast forward 20 years. Blair and Cam decide to focus their semester-long journalism project around solving Clarissa’s disappearance and what better way to do that than with a podcast? Everyone loves a podcast. They set off on their journey by interviewing people who knew Clarissa or who were involved in her case. Naturally, they start with Clarissa’s mother who is oddly eager to speak to them and believes her daughter is still out there somewhere and speaks about her in present tense. It’s sad really, but sometimes hope is all we have.

As Cam and Blair dig through Carissa’s past, secret after secret bubbles to the surface. Secrets not only about their beloved town of Oreville, but about themselves as well. Can they solve the case before it’s too late or will someone do everything they can to make sure some secrets stay buried? More importantly to the girls, will all of this tear apart their friendship?

I’m not used to reading third party pov stories as they often tend to bore me. However, the writing style in this particular instance drew me in and kept me hanging on every word. The ending shocked me, but when thinking back, it was so obvious and completely textbook if you’re obsessed with true crime (like me 🤣). This was a fantastic and fast paced read. Highly recommend to anyone looking for a little bit of mystery.

Thank you to St. Martin’s Press and NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for an honest opinion.

I'm a sucker for a good true crime podcast and am beginning to be a bigger sucker for books about true crime podcasts. Missing Clarissa is definitely one of my new favorite of those books! Blair and Cameron are great characters and I would love there to be another book with more of their podcasts. Loved the story line, the pace of the story, the suspense and twist. Highly recommend.

Special thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a free, electronic ARC of this novel received in exchange for an honest review.
Expected publication date: March 7, 2023
Ripley Jones' debut novel "Missing Clarissa" is a modern and fresh suspense novel with relatable characters, all wrapped up in a clever "who dunnit".
Clarissa Campbell went missing twenty years ago, while at a party with her friends and there has been no trace of her since. Her boyfriend at the time was questioned and released and no one in the small Washington town had any idea what happened to the beautiful cheerleader. Now, Cam and her best friend, Blair, decide to make a podcast about the disappearance for a journalism project. However, their investigation opens new wounds for the town and their new discoveries put their lives at risk.
The premise of "Missing Clarissa" is not new or novel. In fact, I have probably read two or three novels recently with an investigative podcast at its core. Jones, however, makes "Clarissa" unique and relevant, highlighting societal issues (like feminism and racism), and making her characters young and diverse. Cam and Blair are the epitome of “high school bff’s”, with the current challenges of social media as their main stressor, and they are both naïve and delightful. As they try and muddle their way through high school, while investigating a former murder that no one wants re-investigated, it is easy enough to cheer for the friends, and the ending delivers a satisfying outcome for the two.
The story is told by both protagonists, which provides more background for the girls' friendship as well as making for a more well-developed plot. Although the plot takes place primarily as the investigation is ongoing in present day, there are snippets from the past that shed some light on the mystery behind Clarissa’s disappearance. Jones can deliver a captivating, seat-of-your-pants read, and with the knowledge that this is a debut novel? Good things await!
Although the ending was not entirely surprising, I really enjoyed Jones' build up and slow release. Smart and taut, "Clarissa" is an engaging read and if Jones continues along like this, she will be someone to watch for!

I received a free copy from NetGalley. It seems like, "lets do a podcast about an old murder," is the new plot line for a number of books recently. Time and a fresh set of eyes helps, but lack of training for the teenagers doing it always leaves me with some doubt.

Date made up. I feel behind on reviews.

Thank you to #NetGalley, St. Martin's Press, and Wednesday Books for allowing me the opportunity to read a digital ARC of Missing Clarissa by Ripley Jones. This YA mystery will be published in March 2023. All opinions are my own.

In August 1999, recently graduated Clarissa Campbell goes missing in the small town of Oreville, WA. The case makes national news, but Clarissa is never found. Twenty years later, her story is almost mythical and high school students Cameron Munoz and Blair Johnson decide to investigate the story and create a podcast for their journalism project. The two dive into the case and bring old wounds to the surface. It's clear that someone doesn't want the mystery solved, but the question is who.

My official rating for this book is 2.5 stars. It echoes A Good Girl's Guide to Murder to heavily and the writing is chunky and difficult to get into. The point-of-view rapidly changes between Blair and Cam without notice which can be befuddling. Additionally, the story just isn't super believable. Two high school girls start interviewing adults without much research or planning, pretty much just going on a hunch, and the adults pour their hearts out and share secrets they've kept for 20 years without much prompting. It's just too easy and not very realistic. There is also a discussion about the prison system, not appropriating stories, and the mistreatment of subjugated populations. These are important topics, but I felt like the book tried to cover too much in one go. There wasn't a focus and it felt unconnected from the central plot.

Clarissa Campbell disappeared without a trace twenty years ago. Her disappearance was sensationalized in the news, television, and magazines. Back then, it was unheard of for a teen to go missing in the small town of Oreville.

With Clarissa’s disappearance still unsolved twenty years later, it became a journalism project for classmates and best friends, Cameron and Blair to uncover clues that may lead to solving the mystery.

Through a series of interviews with Clarissa’s classmates, friends, and teachers, Blair and Cameron slowly uncover hidden truths and secrets. Truths and secrets that laid dormant for many years and are now coming back to haunt the people that hid them

Missing Clarissa was an engaging read from the get-go. The story unfolds through multiple points of view with flashbacks to the past. There are a number of plot twists that kept me guessing until the end. But in the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t that surprising.

I liked the characters in the novel. They were descript and so real. Each character had a unique personality and I really loved how the author managed to transition from teen characterss to adult characters.

Missing Clarissa is author Ripley Jones’ debut novel. And what a novel it turned out to be! Five amazing stars.

I received a digital ARC from St. Martin’s Press through NetGalley. The review herein is completely my own and contains my honest thoughts and opinions.

Cam and Blair are high school students who are best friends, even though they are quite different. Blair dreams of becoming a writer, and is dating a jock bro. She is quite insecure. Cam is naive, headstrong and impulsive. She is self confident, and feels that the ends justify the means. The start a podcast for their journaliism class. It is about the unsolved case about a local girl who went missing 20 years ago. As their podcast evolves they go from reporting about the case to investigating it.

Overall this was a interesting and quick read. I liked most of the characters, although Cam was extremely irritating. The plot was good, but not that unique. I think that fans of YA mystery/suspense will enjoy this book.

Thank you to Netgalley and St. Martins Press for providing me with an eARC of this book to read and review.