The big plothole is that he never felt the urge to check how she was. He went and checked the Walters, BUT he never checked Missy and Julie.
Uh, no. Jack even explains how Missy became a smaller and smaller part of their lives, eventually being relegated to the 'holiday cards' level of interaction. They tried to make plans, but their schedules kept getting in the way; and eventually they stopped trying. Missy was NOWHERE near the level of Alice and Naomi's family in terms of closeness. Alice was a surrogate mother and Carol spent practically every weekend with Naomi at either her house or theirs. While Missy was a cherished individual that played an important role in their lives, she was hardly a constant presence in the way Alice and Naomi were.
Also, he did eventually check on Missy. He had the urge, and after connecting the dots with his current location and where he remembered her house to be, made up a plan to check on her house and carried it out in rather short order. You're seeing plot holes where there are none.
The women weren't safe at all: they were helpless people treated as prisoners at the mercy of their guards in a war concentration camp. Sydney hadn't realized it yet, but Julie should have. Secondly, Sydney was already in love with MC and fond of Naomi.
Again, no. Safety is relative. Based on the experiences of Jack, Julie, and Alice, the conclusion they could draw was that someone in camp had an axe to grind with men. That meant that this group within the camp only really posed a serious threat to the one they had already tried to kill, namely Jack. The camp had cared for and provided for Alice when she was little more than a corpse in a coma. They'd given shelter to a desperate widow and her child. There were compelling reasons for the women to stay and accept the trade-offs in exchange for relative safety.
Plus, even if you had your way, are 7 people and all their shit going to fit into a classic Charger? Nope. Not even close.
Dude, she got attacked by the zombie AFTER the bandits raided a farm and killed everybody but one. So, her Grandpa knew that there were those rapist killer screwing around and let her 15 years old girl wander around alone.
Again, different mindset. Just look at the weird shit that can become the 'new normal' in our own lives. Deadly mass shootings in schools are a regular occurrence, yet everyone is still expected to send their kids off to school in the morning on the assumption that they'll be safe and come back; and that assumption is correct right up until the moment it isn't.
Plus, we don't know the geography at play here. If the bandits attacked a lone farm miles and miles away on the east side of town and the girl was visiting friends on the opposite side of town? It's established that the Smithfield farm where her friend Maria lives is well over 5 miles outside of the town itself, and 5 miles is a lot of ground to cover on foot. Even then, the most deciding factor in her getting in trouble was cutting through the woods to make up time (which she was explicitly instructed not to do) because she stayed too long at her friend's house. Had she kept to her usual plan and not wandered into the woods, she wouldn't have gotten jumped by that infected. Plus, if she really wanted to go, how much power did anyone really have to stop her, short of physically locker her up in a room or something? Even if he had said no, who was going to stay around and prevent her from sneaking out if she wanted to? Emmie was a kid, and made a dumb kid mistake, and it unfortunately cost her life.
Also, you need to double check the timeline, cause Emmie gets attacked BEFORE Sutter's first farm raid. Her getting jumped is the cliff-hanger ending of Chapter 21, and the Sutter farm raid is the very start of Chapter 22. So NO, she was not allowed to wander around after the bandits had made their presence known. She wasn't given a chance to, she was already dead or dying.
One more: they start driving towards Marshand House with the girls checking the maps, then they totally forget they have maps. They come across some railway tracks and Alice tells she has no idea where they are: well, I guess she just had to check the map. I guess the Author just forgot about the maps.
Did those tourism maps include railroad tracks? Or marked the location of the defunct station they found? As it turns out, using maps are way harder when you don't have GPS telling you exactly where you are on said map. Knowing where you want to go, and actually getting there, are still two very different things. They're not the Lewis and Clark expedition. They're a marketing salaryman, a housewife, and two teenagers who hadn't finished high school; none of whom had probably ever used a paper map for actual navigation before. So again, the fact that they didn't perfectly ace all of the survival checks on their road-trip is not a plot hole, it is rather a pretty rational outcome given the circumstances. That they do get to the house right before a hurricane hits is just good narrative tension building, and only further ups the stakes for the initial encounter with Hana.