In The Missing Half, A Woman Searches For Her Sister

Ashley Flowers loves to keep her audience guessing — both with her hit podcast, Crime Junkies, and her fiction. “I’m all about that killer ending,” Flowers, 36, tells Bustle.

The Missing Half, her new novel coauthored with Alex Kiester, delivers on this promise and then some. The story follows 24-year-old Nic, who has spent the last seven years reckoning with the disappearance of her sister, Kasey. The crime was always linked to another missing persons case — that of a young girl from a neighboring town named Jules — but neither family ever got any closure. Nic is pulled back into the mystery when Jules’ sister Jenna contacts her, desperate to get to the bottom of what happened. But when Nic finally gets some answers, she’s forced to face some hard truths about Kasey’s past.

Thanks to Flowers’ “simple as possible” approach to storytelling (an approach she’s perfected from editing the storylines of over 400 episodes of her podcast), true crime obsessives and genre newbies alike will find the story surprisingly accessible — just don’t expect it to get tied up in a neat bow. “What I want from my novels more than anything, is I want [them] to feel very, very real,” she says. “So much of what I see in real life is, you don’t get a neat bow and you don’t often get a happy ending. Even in a case that gets solved, if it should be happy, that doesn’t mean that everyone’s happy. That’s just not how real life works.”

In the exclusive excerpt below, Nic’s less-than-exciting life becomes a lot more interesting when a mysterious stranger appears. To read more, snag a copy of the book, which debuts today.

Chapter One

2019

I’m mopping up vomit by the claw machine when I notice her watching me.

She’s sitting in a booth where the tables end and the arcade begins, near the old pinball machines no one uses anymore. In her early to mid-thirties, with the slightly haggard look of a parent, she fits our customer mold here at Funland, the go-­to birthday destination for every preteen in Mishawaka, Indiana. But there’s none of the usual evidence of kids around her table, no gnawed-on cheese sticks or packet of wet wipes or discarded action figures. Just a half-drunk soda. When she notices me looking, she nods, then turns away.

There’s something off about the gesture that makes me think she’s nervous, like a bad PI going for casual. I keep watching to see if she’s checking up on a kid in the throng of the arcade, but she just stares at the side of her drink, rubbing her thumb against the glass. Our dinner options are greasy pizza or rubbery burgers, the undersides of the tables are speckled with wads of gum, and the background noise is the shouting voices of children. If she doesn’t have kids, what the hell is she doing here?

The woman flicks her gaze in my direction and then away again. The hair on the back of my neck rises.

I do a last few rushed swipes at the puddle of yellow sick, rinse out the mop and bucket so I can stow them back in the cleaning supplies closet, then scan the place for my manager, Brad. I spot the back of his head as he makes his way over to the computer where we ring up customer bills and half walk, half jog to catch up with him. “Hey, Brad?”

He turns, an affable smile spreading across his face. “Nic, hey. What’s up?”

Brad Andrews gave me my job at Funland eight years ago, back when I was working summers in high school, out of sheer nepotism. He was the best man in my parents’ wedding, and growing up, our families vacationed together every summer. He and his wife, Sandy, are more of an uncle and aunt to me than those related by blood. Neither of us could have foreseen how long I’d be here though, and sometimes our relationship shows the wear.

“That woman.” I nod in her direction. “I think she’s here alone. We may want to keep an eye on her.”

“What woman?” Brad peers over my head. “That one in the blue?”

“She doesn’t have any kids here.” I don’t need to elaborate. We get a certain kind at Funland every once in a while —­ childless middle-­aged men whose eyes linger too long. We usually ask those people to leave.

“She looks pretty harmless to me. A little lonely, maybe, but harmless. Don’t you think?”

I roll my eyes. Brad’s brand of sexism manifests as an unwavering faith in the fairness of the fairer sex. He probably thinks his wife, Sandy, doesn’t masturbate when he’s away, or ever fantasize about a one-­night stand with the young cashier at the grocery store. The idea of a female with actual bad intentions would gobsmack him.

“She was watching me.” I regret the words before I finish saying them.

He glances over in the woman’s direction again, but she’s looking at her drink. “Are you sure?”

Excerpted from THE MISSING HALF, provided courtesy of Bantam. Copyright © 2025 by Ashley Flowers.