What if your soulmate sat in the next row, you both got off the plane drunk on first-class rosé, and you forgot to ask his name? That is the high-concept hook of The Missed Connection by Tia Williams, the New York Times bestselling author behind Seven Days in June and A Love Song for Ricki Wilde. Williams takes a vintage Craigslist trope, drags it into the corporate-email age, and lets it spin out as a glittering Brooklyn-set rom-com with surprising weight underneath the gloss.
Sasha Cruz is a Brooklyn casting director, a self-described inside girl who has spent the last year half-hibernating after a stalking incident in 2022. A work trip to Paris brings her face-to-face with Seat F, an Italian charmer who reads How to Not Die Alone on the plane and seems engineered in a fantasy lab. They part without exchanging names. Sasha then sends a panicked email to her HR contact, and accidentally copies the entire global Seraphina staff. Cue international chaos. Cue a manhunt. And Cue the entrance of Wesley Dane, the ex-detective turned barbecue food truck king who saved her once and now, reluctantly, agrees to find her flight crush.
Sasha, Wes, and the Man in 1F
Sasha is one of Williams’ best heroines because the gloss is paper-thin. She has the diamond studs and the razor-sharp bob, but she also rewires her own kitchen, hides a scar under a gold cuff, and has spent months lying in an empty clawfoot tub bingeing podcasts about funeral clowns. Williams writes anxiety as a lifestyle, not a label. That choice gives the romance real stakes, because Sasha is not just choosing between men, she is choosing whether to step out of her own front door.
Wes Dane is the kind of romantic hero who makes you wonder how the genre survived without him. Tall, dimpled, allergic to losing, recovering from a strict father’s legacy and a checkered past with rules. The fact that he switched from PI work to slow-smoked brisket feels earned, not whimsical, and his slow burn with Sasha is the spine of the book. Then there is Teo, the elusive Seat F. Williams gives him just enough mystery to keep readers leaning forward, and Sasha’s wavering between fantasy and flesh-and-blood reality becomes the real engine of the story.
Williams’ Voice: Sharp, Specific, Brooklyn-Bright
If you have read Tia Williams before, you know the rhythm. Pop-culture in-jokes land in the same sentence as a tender observation about Afro-Latina identity. Best-friend Destiny lectures Sasha about her “Caucasian Fornication” database while Sasha is processing genuine trauma. The dialogue snaps. Fort Greene, Prospect Park, Vanderbilt Avenue, and the Film Forum get lovingly mapped, and Brooklyn comes through as a fully alive place rather than wallpaper.
The standout craft choice here is the non-delivery report interludes. Between chapters, we read replies from Seraphina employees in Algiers, Hong Kong, Dublin, and beyond, all of whom tried to find Seat F and ended up tripping into their own love stories. It is a sweet structural conceit that gives The Missed Connection by Tia Williams a little of the chorus energy you find in epistolary fiction without slowing the central plot.
A few other strengths worth flagging:
- The casting-director window into the beauty-and-entertainment industry is funny and quietly authoritative, the kind of detail you only get when an author has done the homework.
- Williams handles a panic attack on a date with the same care she gives a flirty text exchange. Both feel real.
- The chemistry between Sasha and Wes is genuinely physical on the page without ever tipping into airport-bookstore cheese.
- The humor is character-driven, not joke-driven, which is why it lands.
Where the Connection Loses Signal
This is a four-star book, not a five-star one, and the gaps are worth naming. The Teo reveal, which I will not spoil, is telegraphed early enough that readers who have spent any time in romantic-suspense will probably clock the swerve before the book is ready to deliver it. The will-they-won’t-they between Sasha and Wes also loops one cycle too many in the middle act. There is a stretch around the bench dedication and its aftermath where the book seems to keep deferring its own climax just to extend the tension.
A few of the side characters skirt close to broad sitcom energy. Brooke, Wes’s sister, exists mostly to needle him. Imani McIntyre arrives late and pulls a lot of weight in the resolution. Destiny’s spreadsheet of available men routine is funny on page five and a little tired by page two hundred. None of this sinks the book, but it does keep it from the more emotionally layered terrain of Seven Days in June.
A smaller complaint is the way Sasha’s 2022 stalking history is sketched and then handled fairly briskly. Williams clearly wants the trauma present without dominating the romance, and the choice is defensible, yet a reader who has lived something similar may want more room than the book gives.
Where It Sits in the Tia Williams Universe
For longtime fans, The Missed Connection by Tia Williams reads like a cousin of The Perfect Find (now a Netflix film starring Gabrielle Union) more than a sibling to the heavier, ancestral magic of A Love Song for Ricki Wilde or the soul-deep yearning of Seven Days in June. It sits in her industry rom-com mode. Less weeping, more witty repartee, with the trauma threaded in rather than centered. If you came to Williams via her YA work (It Chicks, Audre & Bash Are Just Friends), this is her grown-and-glossy register, but the breezy, observational voice will feel familiar.
Who Should Pick This Up
You will probably love this if you want:
- A Black-led rom-com with a strong sense of place and culture.
- A meet-cute in the sky, a slow-burn second-chance romance on the ground, and a love triangle that is actually about choosing yourself.
- Dialogue that pops and a heroine whose anxiety is written from the inside out.
- A romance that takes mental health seriously without making it the whole meal.
You will probably bounce off it if you want a tightly engineered romance suspense, a heroine without internal contradictions, or a wholly unpredictable plot. The Missed Connection by Tia Williams is character-first and tone-first. The mystery is the spine, but the muscles are the people.
If You Loved This, Try These Next
- Seven Days in June by Tia Williams, for the same Brooklyn voice with more emotional weight.
- Audrey & Bash Are Just Friends by Tia Williams, for industry-set rom-com energy.
- Honey & Spice by Bolu Babalola, for sharp, voice-driven Black romance.
- Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld, for a workplace-adjacent meet-and-chase.
- Yinka, Where Is Your Huzband? by Lizzie Damilola Blackburn, for a heroine reckoning with what she actually wants.
- Get a Life, Chloe Brown by Talia Hibbert, for an anxiety-coded heroine slowly reentering the world.
- People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry, for a sun-soaked friends-to-lovers parallel.
- Real Men Knit by Kwana Jackson, for tender Black-community romance.
Final Boarding Call
What lingers from The Missed Connection by Tia Williams is not the mystery or the global email blunder. It is Sasha climbing out of her empty bathtub, learning to leave the apartment, learning to want a person in the room rather than a stranger on a plane. Williams has always been drawn to women who look pulled together while quietly falling apart, and Sasha’s path back into her own life is what lifts this above its fun premise. The romance is satisfying, the prose is fizzy, the heart is steady. A confident, glossy entry in a strong career, and easy to recommend even with its softer middle.
