THEN SHE WAS GONE is saved by its writing

another month, another Booktok-recommended thriller

Lisa Jewell has been making her rounds within the thriller/mystery sphere on Booktok as an unputdownable author. Since The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward piqued my interest in the genre last year, I decided to give her a whirl. Read the first 50 pages in the library and practically raced home to download the e-book. Then stayed up till 3am gorging as much as I could. Finished it in two sittings and now here I am with mixed feelings.

Then She Was Gone tells the story of Laurel, whose daughter, Ellie, inexplicably disappears one day. Ten years later, the still-grieving Laurel meets a charismatic stranger called Floyd, whose nine-year-old daughter bears an uncanny resemblance to Ellie when she was that age. A decade’s worth of unanswered questions come flooding back, forcing Laurel to doubt everything she thought she knew.

If this sounds like your run-of-the-mill mystery, that’s because it is. The first chapter is told through Ellie’s POV and hints at the potential villain before quickly switching to Laurel’s. Ellie’s disappearance happens within the first few pages, which I prefer because that leaves more time for the mystery to unfold.

But instead of clues, we are spoonfed hints with aeroplane noises. Where I expected events to unfurl like a flower, it was instead like a red carpet rolled out down a long, straight path, the end of which you can very clearly see. I guessed the entire plot (correctly) about halfway through — and that’s saying a lot because I’m the worst at mysteries and puzzles.

We do occasionally switch POVs between a few other characters, which keeps the story lively and dynamic. Unfortunately, this also reads to me as an easy cop-out to avoid actually putting in effort crafting an intricate and clever mystery. But perhaps I’ve been too spoilt by Needless Street.

All this is not to say the novel isn’t gripping at all. The writing carries the reader smoothly from Point A to Point B with minimal confusion and just enough descriptiveness to keep your nose in it. The characters are unique, realistic, and flawed, but not over-excessively so you stop caring.

In fact, I liked Laurel’s character a lot. She’s just kind of your regular, 50-something supermarket mum standing in the aisle deciding between regular pasta sauce or the no-salt-added version because she wants the best for her family. Which, ironically, makes being in her head a whole lot more pleasant than that of the paranoid, wine-soaked middle-aged female protagonist who spies on her neighbours and makes bad decisions to move the plot along.

All things considered, I don’t think Jewell intended for this to be some great twisty story with a big shock-and-awe reveal. It’s quite your bog-standard crime mystery: well-formulated enough to keep me engaged till the end, but ultimately failing to deliver the punch I was expecting.

Then She Was Gone is rated a whopping 4 stars on Goodreads, which is slightly higher than its peers. Good thing I didn’t check the rating before I finished the book, though, or I would have been sorely disappointed.