The Completionist

A young man's search for his missing sister leads him into a disturbing and desperate underworld, where bitter freedoms are bought at a terrible price. Darlingly inventive, The Completionist brings us a hauntingly familiar future world in which plummeting birth rates have ominous political and personal implications for women.

“Find her. You need to keep looking, no matter what. I'm afraid of what might’ve happened to her. You be afraid too.”

A young Marine, Carter Quinn, comes home from war to his fractured family, in a near-future America in which water is artificially engineered and technology is startlingly embedded in people’s everyday lives. At the same time, a fertility crisis has terrifying implications for women, including Carter’s two beloved sisters, Fred and Gardner. Fred, accomplished but impetuous, the eldest sibling, is naturally pregnant—a rare and miraculous event that puts her independence in jeopardy. And Gardner, the idealistic younger sister who lived for her job as a Nurse Completionist, has mysteriously vanished, after months of disturbing behavior. Carter’s efforts to find Gard (and stay on Fred’s good side) keep leading him back home to their father, a veteran of a decades-long war just like Carter himself, who may be concealing a painful truth that could save or condemn them all.

In the spirit of Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven and The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, The Completionist is a deeply human mystery set in a future that holds our own world in a black mirror.