Book Review: "The Night She Disappeared" by Lisa Jewell

In my time, I have read an awful lot of crime and thriller novels. Being a person to shovel through the paperback bin in the WH Smith or the Asda, I have never turned away from those cheesy ‘chick-flick’ thrillers you find in the store for one or two pounds. I have also never turned away from an author’s next big novel. In the case of Lisa Jewell, the first novel I read by her was “The Family Upstairs” and I think it was a Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club Pick but don’t quote me on that. “The Family Upstairs” was one of those books where I thought I would never find out what was actually going on because of the way the story kept spinning around. However, with “The Night She Disappeared” I did not quite feel the same way. There are advantages and disadvantages to this book (but mainly advantages to be perfectly honest) and I won’t be taking away points for personal preference because that is not entirely fair. Lisa Jewell’s newest novel made me feel different, but not bad and with its very “Gone Girl” and “Girl on the Train” atmosphere, she is already establishing herself to be the new superpower of crime/thriller novels.

About a woman called Talulah and her boyfriend, Zach, this novel explores the theme of young love to begin with. We have a nineteen-year-old couple with a child called Noah and all of a sudden, the couple are gone. Mother of Talulah, Kim, is rightfully terrified. But when a woman called Sophie finds a sign on the path that says “Dig Here” things are about to take a terrifying turn for the worst. When it comes to personal preference, I would say that I personally did not enjoy the storyline as much as I have enjoyed other storylines by the same author but in terms of the way the story is crafted it is absolutely genius. The back and forth between 2017 and 2018, the times were we get interjections of other aspects of the story and how we find out that certain people may not be telling the entire truth of what happened. It is one of those books where you need to pay attention to each and every chapter and every single character in order to understand the entirety of what is going on. Each character seems to be tangled up in this web of what happened and after a pool party, when the couple disappear, they are assumed to be harmed - but everyone except for the mother seems to believe so. When it comes down to the way in which people react to the mystery, I think the most interesting character is Zach’s mother, Megs. She seems to be completely oblivious to the fact that her son is missing even though she is fully aware of it. Making these characters different is key in order to understand why these characters therefore have conflicts.

I will say that out of personal preference, it was not my thing. But, on the other hand, I could appreciate the idea of the story and how well executed it was. We get multiple timelines in one go and they slowly begin to converge on each other, and when they do, tension breaks out. As we come towards the climax of the novel though, I do think that the pace really does help the execution out a lot and that Lisa Jewell may have decided perfectly on the differing lengths of her chapters from many pages at a time to some being only one and a half pages.