Lisa Jewell has become a dependable author in the mystery genre for me. Her books are popcorn thrillers, true, but they aren’t as predictable or clichéd as books by other writers in this genre. That said, I take care to space out my reading of her books and use them as filler material in between tougher, more emotional books that are well written. This way, I enjoy them for what they are.
About the Book
On a beautiful summer night in a charming English suburb, a young woman and her boyfriend disappear after partying at the massive country estate of a new college friend.
One year later, a writer moves into a cottage on the edge of the woods that border the same estate. Known locally as the Dark Place, the dense forest is the writer’s favorite area for long walks, and it’s on one such walk that she stumbles upon a mysterious note that simply reads, “DIG HERE.”
Could this be a clue towards what has happened to the missing young couple? And what exactly is buried in this haunted ground?
~ Synopsis from goodreads
My Review
The Night She Disappeared is a trademark of Lisa Jewell’s writing style, I think, which includes multiple points of view and timelines. Generally, when I read a book of this kind, I am wary of the mystery unfolding too rapidly, but thankfully, that wasn’t the case here.
This book starts off as a slow burn. Jewell takes a lot of time with the setting (a school setting, a favorite of mine for thrillers) and the characters. However, as the story progresses from one timeline and POV to the next, we see that all isn’t as it seems, and one or more people know a whole lot more than they are telling.
There is a section of the story that’s written from the POV of the missing girl, Tallulah, and I think those are honestly the best parts in terms of writing and understanding her psyche, and I really felt for the two of them when they go missing. As a teen mom, she’s ambivalent about her relationship with her boyfriend and the father of her child, and struggles being a mom and girlfriend at the same time.
Men don’t know, she thinks, they don’t know how having a baby makes you protective of your skin, your body, your space. When you spend all day giving yourself to a baby in every way that it’s possible to give yourself to another human being, the last thing you want at the end of the day is a grown man wanting you to give him things too. Men don’t know how the touch of a hand against the back of your neck can feel like a request, not a gesture of love, how emotional issues become too cumbersome to deal with, how their love for you is too much sometimes, just too much. Kim sometimes thinks that women practise being mothers on men until they become actual mothers, leaving behind a kind of vacancy.
Like most teen girls, she’s in love with the idea of being in love, and having a child makes her look at him more critically.
Zach isn’t liberal. He has no time for political correctness. He is his mother’s son: small-minded, self-absorbed, inward-thinking, a little bit racist, a little bit homophobic, a little bit misogynistic. All those things that don’t matter when you’re fourteen and in love, but start to sprout insidiously to the surface over the years it takes you to go from child to adult, and even now it’s not blatant but she knows him well enough to know that it’s there.
Her ambivalence about their relationship and the ways they view their adult lives drive the story leading up to their disappearance.
The second half moves very fast. I started getting a sense of where the story was going in the middle, and I can’t say I liked the direction of the plot. The ending was weirdly anticlimactic, but also surprising (verging on the unbelievable) at the same time. I would say I loved the book till about 3/4th of the way in, but the ending was a letdown. I didn’t like, and more importantly, couldn’t fathom, some of the incredibly stupid choices made by the characters, and eventually it was all a bit of a mess.
As with every novel by this author, I got completely sucked into the mystery and finished it within 24 hours. I also know I won’t be able to distinguish this one from her others by next week, but that’s okay! Sometimes a reliable page-turner suits me just fine.
