Then She Was Gone: From the number one bestselling author of The Family Upstairs

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Did she really run away from home, as the police have long suspected, or was there a more sinister reason for her disappearance? And in this very 'ordinaryness' Jewell creates compelling characters that we come to love and empathise with, and addictive reads. I figured the "mystery" out but that did not spoil the book for me, as I kept turning the pages to see who else was going to figure the book out. Lisa Jewell’s “Then She Was Gone” is a phenomenal psychological thriller that kept me enthralled throughout. Now divorced and distant from her other two children, Laurel is attempting to move on and begins dating a handsome and kind man.

I think the author got the information from the Medical study conducted by the University of Rochester. Ten years after her teenage daughter disappears, a woman crosses paths with a charming single father whose young child feels eerily familiar. Her writing is addictive and appeals to a wide variety of readers; not too light, not too dark, but just right.

i definitely would have loved this more if my predictions had been right, but thats completely my own fault.

I am super creeped out by listening to the endangered characters thoughts and knowing that they will come to a bad end. She's the only one I can sorta, kinda believe because children are amazingly resilient and her biology may have something to do with it. Although parts of the story are a little bizarre (Jewell says this herself in the Acknowledgements), she makes it work. Populated with fantastic characters, this was a fascinating and moving story about obsession, loss, and family.Later she finds out that Floyd's nine-year-old daughter has striking similarities to her daughter Ellie. The realness of the emotions of all of the characters was so realistic and insightful it truly felt like I was experiencing the revealing of the mystery of what happened to her daughter with Laurel. Then She was Gone is not about what happened to Ellie, it’s more about the how and the why she disappeared, as well as the after-effects of her disappearance on her family. I don’t want to say more because part of the excitement of the book is discovering how the various plot lines intertwine and how the mysteries are resolved.

If the author can find just the right combination of these things, then I will be right there ready to throw more stars their way. Even now, after finishing, there are still some questions I have floating around in my head about the events of the novel and the outcome. Meanwhile the family has fallen apart - a divorce for Paul and Laurel and sort of an estrangement between their children. A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been.Laurel, Ellie's mother, is struggling to get her life back on track and save her relationships with her two remaining children.

There were a few minor occurrences I didn’t see coming, but none of them were important enough to the story that they made any kind of difference. even though my original guesses were wrong, its VERY obvious what will happen early on in the story, and so it just started to feel drawn out by the halfway point. Lisa Jewell's first novel, Ralph’s Party, was published in 1999 and was the best-selling debut novel of the year. I was always several chapters ahead of the characters and it sapped a lot of tension out of the story.

A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie.