“It’s Almost Entertainment, Which is a Sad Way to Describe It”: Kellye Garrett on Missing White Woman.

Kellye Garrett on her novel Missing White Woman and the wider phenomenon of the same name.

Kellye Garrett has been writing crime novels for several years but she really hit it big with 2022’s Like a Sister, about a dead reality star whose estranged sister refuses to believe her death was an accident, tapping into Garrett’s prior career in TV writers rooms.

She follows that up with another buzzy premise, Missing White Woman, released earlier this month. The novel follows Bree on a long-weekend getaway with her new boyfriend who, one morning, is nowhere to be found. In his place in their AirBnB is the body of a woman whose disappearance has just so happened to go viral. While the missing and now dead woman happens to be white, Garrett manipulates the phenomenon with which her novel shares its title, casting a Black woman as a person of interest and the one who has to solve this mystery.

Tell me about the inspiration for this book. 

I was on a writer’s retreat in Baltimore, which is about four hours from where I live in New Jersey. It was my friend’s house; she was not there. It was a beautiful four-storey row house. I was by myself and I said to myself—because I have such an overactive imagination—I could go downstairs tomorrow and find a dead body in the foyer and have no idea how it got there. That’s the idea behind Missing White Woman. I flipped it, so Bree, my main character, goes on what’s supposed to be a romantic getaway with a guy she just started dating, and she comes downstairs on the last day of her trip and this missing woman who’s gone viral for her disappearance is dead in the foyer. [Bree’s] boyfriend’s gone. She has no clue what happened, she just knows she has to figure out what happened to her boyfriend and what happened to this woman who is dead.

I couldn’t help but be reminded of the Gabby Petito case while reading Missing White Woman. Are you able to talk a little bit about how cases like hers, which are part of a wider phenomenon of the same name, informed your novel and how you unpacked them?

When I was writing it, Gabby Petito had gone missing.