Then She Vanishes – BooksPlease

Top 5 Tuesday was created by Shanah at Bionic Book Worm, and it is now being hosted by Meeghan at Meeghan Reads. For details of all of the latest prompts for January to March, see Meeghan’s post here.

Today the topic is Top 5 books with a pronoun in the title – Find all of your he, she, they, we or you books and then shout them from the rooftops!! Or just on your blog page.

They Came to Baghdad by Agatha Christie. This is not one of Agatha Christie’s detective novels – no Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot – just Victoria Jones, a short-hand typist, a courageous girl with a ‘natural leaning towards adventure’ and a tendency to tell lies. Set in 1950 this is a story about international espionage and conspiracy.

I Found You by Lisa Jewell. This is the mystery of the identity of the man Alice Lake found sitting on the beach at Ridinghouse Bay (a fictional seaside resort) in the pouring rain. He can’t remember who he is, or how or why he is sitting there.

Then She Vanishes by Claire Douglas. The opening is dramatic as a killer calmly and coolly considers which house harbours the victim and then enters and shoots first a man and then an older woman. Who are they and why were they killed in cold blood?

His and Hers by Alice Feeney. When a woman is murdered in Blackdown village, newsreader Anna Andrews is reluctant to cover the case. Anna’s ex-husband, DCI Jack Harper, is suspicious of her involvement, until he becomes a suspect in his own murder investigation.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson, a weirdly wonderful book. Mary Katherine Blackwood is nicknamed Merricat. But she is anything but merry and as the book opens she is eighteen, living with her sister Constance. Everyone else in her family is dead. How they died is explored in the rest of the book. It’s a macabre tale, with its portrayal of fear, resentment, hostility and the persecution of its disturbed and damaged characters.

Then She Vanishes

Penguin UK – Michael Joseph|27 June 2019|403 pages|Review e-book copy|5*

I loved the other books by Claire Douglas that I’ve read – her third and fourth books, Last Seen Alive and Do Not Disturb, so I had high expectations for her latest book, Then She Vanishes. I was not disappointed – it is brilliant. It gripped me from the start and never let me go. It has twist upon twist upon twist, until I began to doubt everything I’d thought about what I’d read – I was guessing right up to the end when all is revealed. And even then the final twist took me by surprise. So good!

What more can I say? The opening is dramatic as a killer calmly and coolly considers which house harbours the victim and then enters and shoots first a man and then an older woman. Who are they and why were they killed in cold blood?

Enter Jess, a journalist reporting on the murders in the seaside Somerset town of Tilby for the local newspaper, The Bristol and Somerset Herald. She has recently returned to Tilby, her home town, after working in London and is keen to make a name for herself. But it’s not going to be easy, for it turns out that the murderer is Heather, her best friend from school. Heather is unconscious in hospital having tried to take her own life.

Jess can’t believe that her kind, generous friend Heather is capable of killing anyone. So, Jess is torn – how can she report objectively on the case and how will Heather and Margot, Heather’s mother, react when they realise she is a journalist? Their friendship had ended after Heather’s older sister Flora had disappeared, and both girls had withheld what they knew about Flora – Jess still feels guilty about what she did that summer of 1994. The story alternates between events in the present day, and in 1994 when Flora was last seen, told from Margot’s perspective. As Jess investigates she discovers things about Heather and her family she had not known as a young teenager.

Needless to say, but this is a book in which many family secrets are eventually uncovered. It delves into the nature of mother/daughter/sister relationships and of friendship and guilt. To write too much about the plot would only spoil it – you have to experience it as you read to get the full impact. At first it seems quite simple and straight forward, but of course, it isn’t.

Now, I want to read her first two books, The Sisters and Local Girl Missing.

Many thanks to the publishers, Penguin UK – Michael Joseph, for my review copy via NetGalley.