This literary mystery opens with writer Jonathan and his wife Maddie on her birthday. A few hours later, Jonathan is sitting with the police as he tries to explain why his wife would get into a car with a stranger and drive away. Twenty years later, Maddie is presumed dead and Jonathan is living his best life as a popular author of crime novels and getting ready to be married again. Then, one day, he sees catches a glimpse of Maddie in a crowd and his relatively solid life starts to crumble. He tries to explain what he saw to the people in his life, but they don't believe him. Jonathan is sure of what he saw, but if it was Maddie then why isn't she reaching out to him?
TW/CW: pregnancy, discussion of abortion, domestic abuse, child abuse, infidelity, drug use, alcohol use
I think the description of this book is way off and is not doing the book any favors. The description states this is a "propulsive thriller" for fans of Gone Girl. Based on that, I'm expecting to have some real moments of tension and building threats revolving around Maddie and her disappearance. This could not be further from the truth. This read 100% like a normal lit-fic book where the main character is going through a little bit of a mid-life crisis in regards to his upcoming wedding and career trajectory. I didn't find this to have nearly the tension, plotting, or pacing to be called a 'propulsive thriller'. I even hesitate to call this a mystery because, for the majority of the book, finding out what happened to Maddie is not even really a conversation. However, since we do, eventually, get around to questioning and finding out what happened, I'll let it slide.
The characters were a little hit and miss for me, but I did like the way their characterization was handled in the dual timeline. The story flip-flops between the 1990s and 2019 and we see most of the characters in both timelines. I really enjoyed how Wolf tweaked their relationship dynamics between the two timelines and it was interesting to imagine how these characters got from point A to point B over the course of 20ish years. I'd say the slight majority of the story is the 2019 timeline and I found the characters in that part to be really insufferable to read about. In 2019, Jonathan is a very successful author and all of the side characters are equally successful in their own fields. There is a little bit of interpersonal tension, but mostly it is these people going about their days being good at their jobs and having a pretty great life. I found the characters much more compelling in the past timeline because they were in the middle of building their lives and working to get where they wanted to be. Now, obviously, I would expect characters to have some sort of success within 20 years, but since they were all at a high level, it made the characters a bit boring to read from. It felt very much like the story revolved around 'rich people problems' that just weren't built up in a way that was interesting to me.
The pacing gets a little complicated. From a mystery/thriller perspective (which is what I thought this book was) it wasn't very good. It felt like the story had a lot of abrupt starts/stops/direction changes. For example, one conflict comes to a head suddenly when there's basically an intervention for one of the characters. And then during this meeting, we get a dump of information about a different plot line that basically has us ignoring the reason for the intervention and instead following this new information. As we get further along in the story, we increasingly have sections where it is just Jonathan thinking back over his life and career which really grind any sort of plot momentum to a halt. I think these moments are really what made it feel like a 'mid-life crisis' sort of book. All that being said, if I think about the pacing from a lit-fic sort of angle, then I feel like what we get on page much more closely aligns with what I would expect.
Now since this is partly a mystery, we do get some reveals/revelations that I think were pretty effective. There was one reveal that sort of felt like a cheat where Jonathan - our POV character - finds out something that we think is a surprise to him. However, we find out later that him being completely surprised wasn't entirely accurate and it felt like Wolf held back that tidbit of information so it could be used as a second reveal. The actual plot implications of this reveal were very interesting and I liked where the story took it from there. However, I think if there was more build up and more tension leading up to these reveals then the payoff would have been really spectacular. There was one reveal that, when we get it, I was immediately more intrigued with the story than ever before. However, that reveal comes literally on the last page so obviously we don't see any on-page implications. If that ending reveal was the midpoint reveal - I really think that could have made this story more along the lines of what I was expecting. I finished the book the day before writing this review and I can't stop thinking about the implications of that final reveal and I want to see the version of this book that follows those next events.
Overall, I think this was a case of an issue with the description not matching the content of the book. This read much more like a literary fiction with a slight mystery element than the thriller/mystery the description made me expect. I'm not a fan of lit-fic types of stories, but I do think if you are then I would suggest picking this up. It did have some good twists in the end, but nothing that was built up enough for me to really feel satisfied.
Thanks to NetGalley and Mobius Books for the ARC
Expected publication date is June 9, 2022
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