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Bailey and Vanessa shared everything: laughter, secrets, dreams and packets of Pop Rocks to ward off bad days. But that all changed the night Vanessa left Bailey’s, headed for home, and ended up swerving off a cliff nowhere near her house. Bailey thought she knew Vanessa better than anyone in the world, but now she’s left with a million unanswered questions. Why didn’t Vanessa go home? Why was she on that mountain road? Why didn’t she tell Bailey the truth? And what is Bailey supposed to do now that her best friend is gone?

To help grieve her loss, Bailey creates a chat bot of Vanessa using years’ worth of their shared text messages and emails. The more data she uploads to the bot, though, the more it feels like she really is talking to her best friend. But then the bot starts dropping hints that more was going on with Vanessa than Bailey realized, and one of those big secrets may have contributed to Vanessa’s death.

Message Not Found is advertised as a mystery thriller. It’s not. While the book does have a slight mystery, it mostly focuses on Bailey’s grief and what it takes to heal from the loss of that one special person in your life and from the betrayal of all the things left unaired. As such, its pace is slow and its writing is achingly sharp. After all, who wouldn’t want to talk with someone they love after they’ve died? However, Bailey takes it to a whole new unhealthy level with her secret bot, creating a giant emotional roller coaster for readers to traverse.

This is a well-written story, filled with twisted drama and an important message about healing. In short, it is a chaos of curiosity and hurt, and I was not ready for it. I found the story to be a little too sad, too dramatic and, occasionally, too graphic in its descriptions of Vanessa’s death, and it left me feeling depressed long after I put the book down.

(A similar plot device involving a person creating an algorithm that allows a young woman to chat with her late grandmother is found in the very sweet novel Goodbye for Now.)

Rated: Moderate, for heavy topics revolving around grief and the death of a loved one. Profanity includes 4 uses of strong language, 2 variations of strong language, about 15 uses of moderate language, around 23 uses of mild language, and one or two uses of the name of Deity in vain. Vanessa’s death is horrific and unsettling when the details are given, made more graphically descriptive in Bailey’s imagination. Couples cheat on each other. Characters kiss and make out. There are secret meetups with a boyfriend at night. A character talks about their first sex with a friend. Underaged drinking occurs with brief mention of people being wasted.

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