In 1999, the most popular girl in school goes missing, the case quickly became cold, and Clarissa was never found. Flashforward over twenty years later at the same high school, two juniors decide to create a true crime podcast with the hopes of cracking the infamous case in their small town of what really happened to Clarissa.

Much to their surprise, their modest podcast starts gaining popularity as the girls uncover secrets that have been kept well-hidden over the years. As the girls get closer and closer to the truth they must risk it all – including their own safety.

This was a quick, easy and fun YA thriller. It reminded me a little bit of Muderers in the Building and I enjoyed the dynamic between to the two best friends. Overall, I would recommend this if you are looking for a thriller but not wanting something too intense. ⭐️⭐️⭐️! Thank you, @netgalley and @macmillanaudio for for giving me this advanced copy for free in exchange for my honest review. Missing Clarissa will hit shelves March 7, 2023.

I can't wait to read another book from this author! I absolutely thought Missing Clarissa was an exciting and thrilling story. I know that the true crime podcast theme has been done a lot but I especially enjoyed that this book was about friends working on a high school project with podcasting! It provided an unique variation to read about and I was all for it!

Thanks to NetGalley for the privilege to read this in advance!

In the vein of A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder and Truly Devious, Missing Clarissa is (so far) a stand-alone YA book about a cold case mystery investigation by not one but two teenage girls via podcast (for school of course). Cameron P. Muñoz or Cam is the now-clichéd “I’m super smart in books and math but don’t get people” teenage girl (similar to Pip from AGGGTM series and Stevie from TD series). Blair is her best friend and gets roped into Cam’s impetuous schemes. Blair also has an inferiority complex despite her decent skills as an athlete, writer, and being an overall empathetic and caring person. What starts off as an “easy A and ticket to Harvard “ for their Journalism class turns into a full blown search for Truth and Justice (capitalization for a hint of sarcasm). Maybe I’m just a cynical middle aged lady but the rants on social injustice, racism, colonialism, etc. were a bit too preachy, idealistic, and self-righteous for my taste though all were valid points of course, just their presentation felt insincere and inorganic. I sometimes forget teenagers can be super intense but the characters sometimes lacked the depth or well-roundedness to seem real or believable. Overall I enjoyed the story and devoured it just like I did the entire AGGGTM and TD series. This book felt like it was just missing some element to be as good or compelling as those books. 3.5 stars rounded up to 4.

Missing Clarissa is a gripping debut novel by Ripley Jones that tells the story of the disappearance of Clarissa Campbell, a popular cheerleader who vanished from a party in the woods outside her small town. The story is told through the eyes of Blair and Cameron, two high-school juniors who start a true crime podcast in an effort to unravel the mystery of what happened to Clarissa.

The characters in Missing Clarissa are brilliantly drawn - they feel like people you may have known in high school. Blair and Cameron are relatable and sympathetic, and the other characters in the book are well-developed and intriguing. The plot is well-paced and suspenseful, and I found myself eagerly turning the pages to find out what happened to Clarissa. The writing is a unique mix of dark, funny, and grit. Fully engrossing novel. I read this novel in a state of intense, breathless excitement and I NEVER SAW THE ENDING COMING. Which is rare. Extremely rare for me. There is outstanding LGBTQ+ representation in both the teenagers and the adults. There is neurodivergent representation (at least I think?). The twists were great.

I will be the first one to say that I think true crime podcasts are overdone in thrillers/suspense novels lately, but this one was done extremely well in a smart and sophisticated way.

I don't read a lot of YA novels. I told myself ''I'll just start this one and go to sleep. 8 hours later, it's 5 am, I haven't slept, I am absolutely dazzled.

Why am I not giving it 5 stars? I felt like the main characters were not given the same depth. Cameron was beautifully rendered, but Blair seemed like an afterthought. There wasn't the same progression of her character's traits or a satisfying conclusion for her and I really wish there was.

In sum, Missing Clarissa is a fantastic debut novel that won't let go of its readers until they reach the final page.
If you like suspenseful books, I think you'll really like this one.

Read this if you liked :
- One of Us is Lying
- A Good Girl's Guide to Murder
- Pretty Little Liars if the representation of Emily didn't suck
- Podcast My Favourite Murder / Crime Junkie

Quick and easy true crime type read. The only reason I did not give this book 5 stars is because the main characters are young high school and I could not relate to them as much as a woman in my late 30s. HOWEVER, the mystery aspect and the arm chair detective aspects of this book were great. It was a compelling story with believability and a good twist ending.

Missing Clarissa is compared to Sadie and A Good Girl's Guide to Murder, two of my all-time favorite books, so I was very excited when I got my hands on it.

Blair was sweet and I couldn't help, but root for her. It's always great to watch someone overcome their insecurities and lose their fear of judgement from others. She's definitely going to be fan favorite. Unfortunately, I can't say the same for Cam. It was very hard to connect with her, especially the way she treated people. I had no sympathy for her, but I did enjoy her banter with her mother.

Which leads me to the second problem; I couldn't get into this book. It wasn't the pacing, which was steady or the mystery because everyone loves a nice who-dun-it. I think it was the lack of stakes for me. I didn't understand why the podcast about Clarissa was so important to Blair and Cam, why they wanted to solve the crime. Sure, it was for school and justice but there were no personal stakes.

3⭐️. Although I would Listen to Missing Clarissa, if it were a real podcast. I would not even pay the MC's, Cam and Blair, to find my missing sock.

Missing Clarissa is about two teenage girls, who for their journalism project, decide to make a podcast about the disappearance of the local, pretty white blond girl in their town and find the answers many others couldn't.

I really liked the blurb of this book. However many aspects of this book are not new/fresh nor challenged enough. Cam and Blair were a bit flat and I disliked how we got a ending recording from Blair but not Cam. There was also more emphasis on one suspect than the actual killer which was weird to me.


The characters kept bringing up white supremacy and the fact that people in their town only cared about Clarissa because she was a "dead pretty [white] girl." This fact isn't challenged in the book only brought up, a lot. I feel like the author should have made Clarissa nonwhite then. It is one thing to state the obvious, the status quo, it is another to challenge it. The novel to me lacked depth. The characters kept saying things that were correct in my eyes, in regards to capitalism, white supremacy and prison abolition, but yet again the story did absolutely nothing to challenge that. The style of the writing was too simplistic for such statements. The author never went into depth on what such statements/beliefs would mean/look like for the characters. For example, a character talks about "what good will the police be?" And that "marginalized people" go to prison but the killer And the main suspect were white. Also the MC's called and used the police All the time. They didn't do things only by themselves they used the police and police resources, so the police did them a lot of good.

I did like how we got to see the girls set up the podcast instead of the book starting off with it already put together. The MC kept saying that they didn't see Clarissa as a person and that can ring true in real life. Often, because of the true crime boom, the victims of horrible crimes are seen/used as characters for entertainment. There was a good amount of self awareness from the MC's that I liked but that too was not challenged enough in the novel. I know the spotlight in this book is on Clarissa but I felt that the MC's could be padded more. I did like Cam and Blair's relationship but that too felt shallow. There was no declaration, no "I'm in this with you b/c I love you and you're my best friend" type of declaration, even when Cam was in danger. To me Cam and Blair didn't have a deep enough connection.

I recommend this novel for mystery/thriller fans who want a quick YA murder mystery read with surface level revolutionary comments.

A huge thanks to Netgalley and St. Martins Press/Wednesday Books for an eARC in exchange for my honest review.

This was a solid, fast-paced mystery that felt like it belonged on the younger endd of the age spectrum (aside from two uses of the C word) - the characters are messy teens who make silly mistakes and bad decisions and at times Cam felt annoyingly young or immature but I enjoyed the book and it was a quick and easy read. I especially loved that Cam is queer! Mysteries so rarely feature queer characters!

Twenty years ago, the school’s most beloved girl disappeared from a party in the woods. Since then, Clarissa’s case has gone cold. Today, two students, Blair and Cam, decide to start a podcast as a project for their journalism class. Their investigation quickly goes from casual curiosity to an ambitious search for justice as they discover a complex web of secrets that never made it to light.

This is a really enjoyable mystery to partake in. I enjoyed the girls' journey and their relentlessness in finding the truth. Their podcast turned investigation becomes a harrowing adventure. The chapters are fittingly structured as podcast episodes while the girls complete each one. As they continue to find new information, the layers and suspicions build the tension into an epic conclusion.

We get to see Blair and Cam grow and learn more about themselves along the way. It’s a story full of teenage angst, coming-of-age drama between friends and family, bravely coming out, and a fight for the truth. I enjoyed journeying with them through the highs and lows of high school and seeing them take on something that is very adult in nature where everyone else has seemingly failed.

The tone and style of the narrator’s voice is perfectly appropriate for the girls, letting their unique and polar opposite personalities shine through. The writing really puts the reader into their perspectives. This was a fun, fast-paced story and I recommend it to any young adult readers. If you are looking for something easy, exciting, and emotional, this is a great story for you.

I'm not quite sure how to write this review as I'm teetering between this novel being really great and profound, to it's a story that's too similar to other books out there. There's a lot going on in Missing Clarissa, but I'll do my best in writing my thoughts on this story.

Missing Clarissa is a true whodunit kind of story with main characters who are on a compelling drive to find the truth of a missing victim, who may or may not be dead. There are decent supportive characters and the plot itself is pretty straightforward - there's an open case of a murdered teen years ago and 20 years later best friends Blair and Cameron decides to take on this murder mystery for a Journalism class project.
The book was pretty easy to read and the crime itself was your typical "murdered victim still missing" kind of plot. The main characters Blair and Cameron are your typical teenagers in high school still trying to find their identities and not too sure on why the missing teenager saga has practically taken over their current lives.

There are lots of minute details in the story that eventually led up to solving the mystery and the disappearance of Clarissa Campbell brings out some well hidden secrets from the past. However, where I got a bit confused were the "confessions" or thoughts of some of the "suspects" that the writer put in the story itself. All of a sudden, in the middle of the story there are several long paragraphs from some of the characters as if the writer was trying to tell you their thoughts. It just didn't make sense the way it was presented and almost felt unnecessary. If the writer was trying to share the innermost thoughts of the characters, then their thoughts should have been presented in a separate section or more meshed into the story.

And now comes my irritation for some of the mini plots in this story - and some minor spoilers here:
You can clearly tell that the writer was trying to insert some kind of social justification for Cameron who was borderline lesbian and trying to discover herself. There were also some descriptions of "white" that felt odd the way it was presented in the story. There were also obvious notations of racial issues, sexual orientations, social injustices, and gender discrimination. I mean, all of these topics are important and crucial in everyday life, but in this story, it just felt disjointed and placed into the story at odd and unfitting places.

Other than some of the ill-placed injustices (and mind you, I get that the author was trying to call these out), it just wasn't very smoothly placed into the story. But aside from what I pointed out in this review, the story itself was a good read. I liked both Blair and Cam, Cam's mom, Sophie, and even James, Blair's clueless jock boyfriend.
Overall, I do recommend this book to read as it's a pretty straightforward whodunit story. The main characters are easy to like and aside from a few dull areas, the author did a pretty decent job of getting to the grit of the story and ending the story in a justified way.

This was incredible and everything I want from a thriller. I loved the characters and the way they were written, they were like the opposites of each other, but they made for such a good duo. The plot was fantastic, but I won't spoil anything about that. I'll be reading more from this author for sure.

This one reminds me a little of Good Girls Guide to Murder but it just didn't have the same appeal. Blair and Cam, two friends choose a journalism assignment that involves investigating an old cold missing persons case. They create a podcast revealing their finds along the way as they delve into the history of the case. This of course causes unrest in the community and opens up old wounds and not all of the interest in the podcast is positive.

It was ok and it did have some twists that kept me reading. I am not the target audience for this YA read and as an adult some of the plot didn't fit for me, but for YA readers they may relate to the characters and storyline where I didn't.

Thanks to netgalley for my e-copy in exchange for my review.

I couldn’t put it down! I absolutely loved Cam and Blair. They were well-written and great contrasts to each other. I found myself desperate to find out who they were interviewing next. I was guessing until the very end. Definitely recommend!

Thank you NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for this eARC in exchange for an honest review.

I liked the idea of this book- the true crime vibes, the teenagers making a podcast for a project that turns into something more. But... A lot of the writing was just... off. Not worded well, strange sentence structure, and weird vocabulary. It just didn't flow very well. Also, there was some sort of racial obsession in the character descriptions. That was very strange and out of place. I think this idea was poorly executed for both a young adult and adult audience. It was missing something.

In 1999, Clarissa Campbell disappeared from Oreville, Washington without a trace. Twenty years later, high school students Cam and Blair choose Clarissa's cold case as the topic of their school journalism project, resolving to research and create a podcast that will bring her disappearance back into focus, possibly rustle up some new evidence, and ideally finally lead to some answers and some justice. MISSING CLARISSA charts the course of the girls' investigation, as they weather typical adolescent trials and tribulations while also learning that even in a small, boring town like Oreville, secrecy and suspicion runs rampant - and with Clarissa's case, they might just be in over their heads.

I really enjoyed reading this, though I don't think I could go so far as to say that it's an objectively good, well-written book. It was compulsively unputdownable, the sort of surface-level YA mystery that you can fall into and be carried along by, and before you know it four hours have passed and you forgot to eat anything for lunch, but also you couldn't necessarily explain to anyone who asks what was happening in the story because you're just not on that level with it. I think a lot of this comes down to the fact that Ripley Jones writes with such a strong, engaging, almost personable narrative voice, which almost tricks you into overlooking some of the more obvious flaws in plotting and characterisation.

What brought this book down for me, honestly, was how a lot of it seemed to lack a sense of completeness. It tackled a lot of different angles and side plots, but with almost no follow-through, and most of the resolution to various things was relayed in exposition at the very end of the book. For minimally-plot-spoiler-y example, Blair's relationship with James: that man was a supreme shithead of the highest order, the potential for all-out conflict was bubbling away every time he appeared on the page, plus I feel like there were some pretty obvious connections and connotations being drawn between this coupling and Clarissa's own romance with Brad that were practically begging to be explored and addressed. But when Blair finally ended things with him, as we all probably guessed she would, it happened... off-screen? We don't even know if she called him out on half of the shit he deserved to be called out on. What was the point? Why invest energy in the relationship at all, if that was how it was always going to end? Not to mention, this takes away from any sense of positive evolution for Blair's character, as we can't conclusively say whether she broke up with him because she finally realised her own worth or because she was just pissed off in a single split second.

The police corruption angle could have been so wide-reaching and pivotal, especially in the context of the rest of the book's social consciousness and awareness, but really, it was the topic of a single chapter and then dropped. Cam's disregard of journalistic ethics, not to mention the total lack of consequences that she suffers for her actions, bothered me to no end. And holy podcast, Batman: I almost forgot there was one, I almost forgot the girls were doing a project for school and not just investigating this cold case in their own spare time. (Although, to be fair, I've never listened to any podcasts created by teenagers, but I suppose this is how I imagine them treating it, thinking it's so simple and easy, that you can record something on your phone, post it with the right hashtags, and achieve popularity overnight.) Which brings us to the conclusion of the actual mystery, of Clarissa's disappearance, which was so lackluster and devoid of dramatic tension.

All of that being said, I do think YA audiences will gobble this up. It has enough of the right components to be a knockout. For more discerning readers... there are better true crime podcast novels.

<i>Everybody loves a dead girl.</i> That's a statement that a perusal of the mystery selections of almost any demographic will show you - there's a literary fascination to the young, dead, pretty, and white. But <i>why</i> is that true? While Ripley Jones doesn't fully answer the question in the novel, they certainly come close, and the answer is both chilling and familiar: because a dead girl can no longer speak for herself.

The lesson (along with several others that are very apt in our true crime obsessed world) isn't hammered in, but rather hinted at and eventually shown as protagonists Cam and Blair take their town's legendary Dead Girl and make her the subject of a journalism class project. When they start, they're both thinking that this will just be an easy way to get a good grade, but as they did deeper into Clarissa's disappearance in 1999, they begin to understand grimmer and darker truths about her story than they were looking for. There's a certain amount of the old "but it was a different time!" excuse thrown at them, and Cam in particular is looking to fight back against that as a viable excuse.

While the identity of the killer is relatively easy to piece together, the story is still fascinating. Both Blair and Cam are interesting characters, and the way Cam is written lets us know that she's neurodivergent without the author actually <i>saying</i> it. If you enjoyed <i>Sadie</i> by Courtney Summers, you'll definitely want to check this out. Dead girls deserve voices, and, the story tells us, maybe it's time to start paying attention to them while they're alive - as <i>people</i> rather than "girls."

I have received this ARC from NetGalley in exchange of an honest review.

This was my first read from Ripley Jones and I can’t believe I haven’t read any of their work before!

Missing Clarissa was an excellent read as a YA Thriller! It had me guessing all the way until the end!
Missing Clarissa reminded me of the new TV show on Hulu “Only Murders in the Building” because of the podcast aspect and the mystery of Who-done-it! Definitely giving a 5 out of 5 stars on this one!!
#netgalley #missingclarissa #ripleyjones

3.5 stars soley due to the switching POV without story breaks. Maybe its just the literature nerd in me, but it really messed with my enjoyment of the story.

Overall plot was engaging. Teenage girls acting like teenagers can get annoying yet its true to life. Acknowledgement of journalistic integrity, ethics, and white girl privilege raised it up slightly.

Going to tell my actual YA niece to check this out when its released at her library.

Thank you to St. Martin's Press, Wednesday Books, and NetGalley for providing an eARC for a honest review.

I thought about giving up on this book a few times but kept reading because I needed to know who did it. I was pleasantly surprised that the ending was not as predictable as I expected it to be.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

3 stars.

Spoilers ahead. I will not reveal anything big - most of the review vaguely alludes to plot, structure, and characters.

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Okay, so I think this is a pretty average story - a missing white girl, other girls trying to solve her disappearance years later. We have seen it before and will see it again. The suspects were predictable, though that isn't necessarily a bad thing - after all, true crime fans know that the friends/boyfriend/person who inserts themself are always looked at first. I felt that the characters were frustratingly one-dimensional and underdeveloped - so much of their individual development came from unnecessary romance subplots, which made them define themselves through others. The justice "lessons" were very heavy-handed and felt very forced, no matter how true and accurate they are. I really liked the journalism teacher, and wish he had been utilized more as a guide or mentor type figure. And I will say that I did like that there were actual, real stakes for the main character's needlessly selfish and reckless behavior. Overall it's...fine. There's nothing glaringly wrong with the prose, and it's a fast read that many will like. It just wasn't for me.

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Again, thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.