The Reappearance of Rachel Price

I picked this one up because I had liked Holly Jackson before and I wanted to see what she would do outside Pip's world. The pitch hooked me fast. A mother vanishes, a daughter grows up in the glare, then the mother walks back in during a documentary shoot. Published in 2024 by Delacorte Press, it runs 448 pages in the standard US edition. I read it over three nights and I kept stopping to argue with myself about who to trust.

What I did not expect was how much it is about cameras. Not just the documentary inside the story, but the way Bel has lived watched for years. Neighbors, classmates, internet sleuths, all with a theory. Her dad was tried and found not guilty, but that never ended it. So when Rachel Price comes home, Bel is not relieved. She is angry, and tired, and suspicious from the first hug.

Bel, full name Annabel Price, is eighteen and prickly in a way I liked. She steals small things and hides them. A chess piece, a hotel pen, bits that mean nothing to anyone else. She hates sitting in the back seat of cars. She loves her dad fiercely and she fights with him like someone who is scared to lose the only steady parent she has. She walks to school with her cousin Carter, who is more like a brother. She snaps at producers. She falls for a boy and pretends she is not. She reminded me of friends I had at that age who acted tough because soft felt unsafe.

A documentary no one really wants

The Price family agrees to take part in a true crime documentary because money is tight and because Charlie thinks it might finally clear the air. Medical bills for his father Patrick have piled up. The old house needs work. Charlie works long hours. Saying yes to cameras feels practical, even if Bel hates every minute.

The director is Ramsey Lee, professional and calm on the surface, with a crew that includes his brother-in-law Ash Maddox doing behind the scenes work and second camera help. They rebuild the night Rachel vanished on the actual road. Fake snow, a replica of the old Honda Accord, an actress named Jenn playing Rachel in a red top and black jeans. Ramsey asks Bel about the mall, about being found in the car as a two year old, about Phillip Alves, the case obsessive who once grabbed Bel from school when she was eight to question her. Bel answers because she has to, then storms off when Jenn starts gossiping that Charlie probably did it.

That fight in the woods tells you a lot. Bel hurls her chips, tells Ash to leave her alone, then walks the long way home to cool down. It is an hour on foot from the highway shoulder into Gorham. She is sweating and replaying Jenn's voice. Then near the railroad tracks she sees a woman shuffling. Red top. Black jeans. Bel assumes it is Jenn still in costume and makes a crack. Then the woman turns.

It is Rachel. Older, thin, filthy, feet bleeding, hair matted, with the same gray blue eyes and the small birthmark on her forehead. Bel runs. She gets home, locks the door, hides. Then she thinks of her dad, of how he once said on camera what he would give to hold Rachel again, and she opens the door.

Sixteen years gone in one story

Rachel's first account is thin. She says a man took her from her car sixteen years ago and kept her in a dark basement. She never saw his face clearly. She never learned his name. That day, she says, he put a bag over her head, drove, left her on a highway near Lancaster, New Hampshire, and she walked for hours to get home.

Charlie comes home and does not look joyful. He looks scared. He steps back. He asks how this is possible in a tight voice. That reaction coldly sets the rest of the book. A husband who waited sixteen years should cry or laugh or grab her hands. Charlie freezes.

Police chief Dave Winter arrives because a neighbor called. Bel gives a statement at the station. Winter says other departments did log calls about a woman walking south along the highway, so part of Rachel's story checks out. Bel mentions a slip. In one telling the car engine was left running. In another the man turned it off. Winter waves it off as trauma and exhaustion. Bel signs her statement, gives a DNA swab, learns Rachel is coming home with them, and answers with a flat oh that I felt in my stomach.

I thought Jackson did this stretch well. The homecoming is not warm. Rachel calls her Annabel, which no one uses now. She does not know house rules. She asks Bel to watch old home videos. She tries to cook, tries to sit close, tries to ask about school. Bel pulls away. Charlie starts staying late at work. The house feels crowded and empty at once. If you have ever had a relative stay after a funeral, that itchy feeling of love plus want them gone, you will recognize it.

Little cracks Bel cannot ignore

Bel starts keeping a private list, not for school like Pip, just in her head and phone notes. Rachel says she was held sixteen years, then once says fifteen. She remembers a bracelet Bel had as a small child during years she claims she was locked away. She asks a lot of questions about Patrick, Bel's grandfather, where he goes, who cares for him, when his caregiver Yordan is around.

Bel teams up with Ash to chase a thin lead. A woman named Alice Moore once said she saw Rachel in her store about a year before the official return. Bel finds a CCTV still that might show her mother. It is blurry. You could argue either way. For Bel it is enough to keep digging. If Rachel was seen a year ago, the basement story falls apart.

Other threads pile up. Bel's grandmother Susan, Rachel's mother, still believes Charlie killed her daughter and says so to cameras. Sherry, Carter's mother and Jeff's wife, hints Rachel was close to Bel's homeroom teacher Julian Tripp and borrowed money from him just before she vanished. Jeff, Charlie's brother, gets cagey when Ash's mic catches him asking Patrick where Rachel was all those years. Patrick himself has advanced dementia and cannot be asked straight. Carter likes Rachel and tells Bel she is being paranoid. That stings because Bel and Carter have always been a unit.

My favorite small tension here is Bel and Ash. He shows her his family tattoos, one for each sister and his mother Bridget, plus Eve and Rosie and Lily in the mix, and he jokes to cover nerves. She pretends she does not like him while clearly liking him. Their search through town records and school gossip feels like two kids playing detective until it stops feeling like play. Someone is watching the house at night, Ms. Nelson across the road says so. Then Charlie vanishes one morning. No note that makes sense. Bel is sure Rachel knows more than she says.

The family is not what it looks like

This middle part frustrated me in a good way and a bad way. Good because Jackson keeps shifting who looks guilty. Bad because there are a lot of names and side interviews and I had to flip back to keep Jeff and Charlie and Patrick straight, and to remember who Sherry is mad at in which scene.

Phillip Alves breaks in looking for clues and grabs Bel in the dark when she calls police. Rachel pulls him off her just in time. For a moment Rachel looks like a protector. Then Bel installs a small camera at Patrick's house because she guesses Rachel will go there. Rachel finds it right away. Bel asks where Charlie is. Rachel will not say.

Bel learns two things about her dad that shake her. When she was little, after Rachel vanished, she was once left in the car outside a Taco Bell for three hours. Charlie always joked it was fifteen minutes. It was not. And Charlie scolds her for being clumsy and breaking a favorite mug, with that loving dad tone that makes her feel small. Then she finds the mug hidden intact. Small lies, but they change how she hears his bigger claims.

Jeff tells her more. Charlie called a man named Robert Meyer before he disappeared. A boy named Matthew Abbey used Charlie's credit card. None of it adds to a clean exit. It adds to a man running or taken.

At a family dinner Rachel gives Patrick a copy of The Memory Thief. Bel fixates on it. Why that book, why now. She and Ash go to Patrick's house and search his shelves. Inside they find a note that reads like a cry for help. My name is Rachel Price. I am being kept by Patrick Price in a red truck in Price Logging Yard. Page 329 in my copy, and I stared at it for a while before I kept reading.

They run to the logging yard. In the red truck they find Charlie, chained, begging to be let out. He will only talk to Bel, so Ash waits outside. Then Rachel arrives. And the story turns over completely.

The red truck

Here is what Rachel says, and the book gives you reason to believe her even as Bel shakes. Patrick, not a stranger, held Rachel for fifteen plus years in that truck and in other spots on the yard property. Charlie had asked his father to kill Rachel, and Patrick chose lock up instead of murder. Rachel gave birth in captivity. That baby is Carter.

Read that again because I had to. Carter, raised as Jeff and Sherry's son, Bel's beloved cousin, is Rachel's child. Sherry knows and has lived with it. Jeff knows. Charlie knows. The whole adult structure around Bel was built to hide it.

Bel believes her mother in that moment in the truck. They decide to leave Charlie locked up. Then Jeff arrives and lets Charlie out. Charlie chases them with an ax toward an old mine shaft on the property. Rachel and Bel run. Charlie grabs Rachel. Carter appears and shoves Charlie off. Charlie falls into the mine, dragging Jeff with him. Both men die in the fall. Rachel climbs down to hide signs. Bel runs to Ash's hotel room and deletes footage. Ramsey and Ash later admit they kept copies but agree not to release them to protect Bel and Rachel and Carter.

The last pages move fast. Bel, Rachel and Carter pretend not to know where Jeff and Charlie went. Sherry is pushed to move away and stay quiet. Rachel and her two daughters move in together. Bel says goodbye to Ash without bitterness. She accepts Carter might leave for work or school one day but trusts she will come back.

I liked the close more than I expected. Bel finally believes Rachel was taken by force, which eases her fear that her mother chose to leave her. That does not fix everything. It just lets her sleep.

Did it all hold together. Mostly. The final quarter tears along and I forgave a lot because I could not stop. Still, a few things nagged me. Bel walks alone into places she should not, twice, after being told not to. The police feel oddly hands off to keep teens in front, with Winter accepting thin answers when a harder push would end the plot early. The documentary crew keeps filming past points where real producers would be stopped by lawyers. And Carter's parentage, while shocking, relies on several adults keeping a huge secret in a small town for years without a single slip to police.

What works better is Bel's voice. She is not sweet. She hoards, she lies to police about calling them when she calls her dad first, she is rude to Jenn and then feels bad, she pushes Ash away and pulls him close. Her fear of the back seat, her habit of pocketing objects, her need to sit near exits, all of it grows from being the toddler left in a car and the kid grabbed by Phillip Alves. Jackson does not explain that with a speech. She just shows Bel doing it again and again until you get it.

If you liked the interview logs and timelines in Jackson's earlier books, this one is looser. Less school project, more house with cameras in it. The mystery is still fair. The engine slip, the fifteen versus sixteen, the bracelet memory, the CCTV still, the book gift, all of it pays off. I guessed part of the Patrick angle late, but I did not guess Carter. That reveal truly surprised me.

For readers who want a complete account, this summary covers the shape without quoting lines. Two girls grow up as cousins who are actually half sisters. A grandfather jailer with dementia cannot answer. A father who wanted his wife dead plays grieving husband on film. A mother who survived by staying quiet learns to mother late. Bel, caught between, chooses her mother and her sister over the dad who raised her. It is sad and messy and it sticks.