Book Review – The Night She Disappeared – Interesting
Table of Contents
My Rating – 4 out of 5
Plot Summary (Storyline) – The Night She Disappeared
Well, to kick it off, I am still trying to recover my breath from finishing The Night She Disappeared! It’s intriguing, exciting in its own way, and thoroughly enthralling!! Lisa Jewell’s earlier novels – The Family Upstairs and Then She Was Gone were both bestsellers but I think this one is her best yet. The writing style is so engaging that it wants to make you read just that one more page before you keep it down for the night, you want to so desperately know what happens next! The hero is no hot-shot police detective (there’s one though) but a detective novelist newly arrived at the location and is amateur as they get but the mind is just as sharp.
Getting back to the story – There are three timelines in which the story is told – one from a year before the incident (2016), one the year of the incident (2017), and one a year after (2018) and according to the epilogue by the author, this novel got delayed by the onset of the pandemic, almost by two years. Tallulah Knox, a 19-year-old unwed mother to Noah, who’s not yet one, lives with her mother Kim and her boyfriend Zach Allister in a rural corner of Surrey, UK. Tallulah and Zach are childhood sweethearts, though the early parenthood has put doubts in the mind of Tallulah, whether she’s ready for life with Zach as husband and wife.
Tallulah and Zach had broken up right after Noah’s birth but then got back together to give Noah a wholesome family to grow up within and despite their misgivings, they are giving themselves a chance – at marriage, a stable family life. Around this time, Tallulah comes across Scarlet Jaques – a spoilt rich brat of sorts, who lives in ominously named estate Dark Place, bordering the woods on the other side of Maypole House, their college. Scarlet has her own retinue of a fawning entourage and Tallulah doesn’t fit in at all. But as luck would have it, they do and that’s the beginning of an eccentric relationship. Zach doesn’t like Scarlet but goes along in deference to Tallulah’s wishes.
Then one night, Tallulah and Zach go into the village Pub – Swan & Ducks for a rare night out, since Noah was born. There is Scarlet and her gang there too and after a while, they all go to Scarlet’s house for a pool party. Late in the night, when Tallulah and Zach leave, they never return! As if they’ve just vanished from the face of the earth. There’s no message from them, no CCTV record of them going anywhere and nobody knows where they’ve gone… A year passes by and Kim is frantic, the police are clueless but the teenagers are still missing. Theories abound, but Kim knows that neither Tallulah nor Zach would ever leave Noah, whatever the motivation.
A year later, Maypole House gets a new Head Teacher, and his girlfriend Sophie Beck is a moderately successful detective novelist. Soon after, Sophie discovers a sign just outside her backyard which says ‘Dig Here’! It seems someone in the village knows something and wants the investigation into the disappearance to be reopened. Sophie connects with Kim and she, in turn, convinces the police to reinvigorate the stalled investigation. A search in the mysterious dark woods behind the college takes place again, but would the mystery now be solved??
Conclusion – Book Review of The Night She Disappeared
This is a story of average people, there are no superheroes here. A distraught mother and a persistently inquisitive amateur sleuth, in the form of a novelist, is all it takes to unravel a mystery that’s baffled a community and its police force for over a year. The writing is fluid, Lisa ratchets up the momentum with consummate ease and there’s nary a dull moment where you wonder where this is all going. This is a must-read, people! Don’t miss it!!
*I hope you have enjoyed reading this book review as much as I have enjoyed writing this! Do watch this space for more such reviews and navigate through the links below for more… Thank you!! *