Midsummer 2017: teenage mum Tallulah heads out on a date, leaving her baby son at home with her mother, Kim.
At 11 p.m. she sends her mum a text message. At 4.30 a.m. Kim awakens to discover that Tallulah has not come home.
Friends tell her that Tallulah was last seen heading to a pool party at a house in the woods nearby called Dark Place.
Tallulah never returns.
2018: walking in the woods behind the boarding school where her boyfriend has just started as a head teacher, Sophie sees a sign nailed to a fence.
A sign that says: DIG HERE . . .
My thoughts
Well I’ve gone and popped my Lisa Jewell cherry and what a blooming book to pop it with. The Night She Disappeared is so good.
Set around the disappearance of a young couple Tallulah and Zach in 2017, the story tells us of the before, the after and then a year later when Sophie and her headteacher boyfriend move into a cottage close by. Each time frame is intriguing and gripping and I loved that the story moved back and forth seamlessly. It’s such an easy listen, you can end in one time frame then come back later or even the next day and start off in another time frame and it all just flows beautifully.
I’ve said this many times before but I like to play detective when reading, I like to try and guess what’s going to happen, see if I can get the ending right. Well I was completely stumped with this one. Lisa Jewell drip feeds you throughout this book, she lets ideas form in your mind but without squashing them she lets more ideas form so I ended up with all these theories and none were right.
I can’t believe how quickly I managed to get through this book, every time I switched it off or my phone battery died I kept thinking about it. Being similar ages with Tallulahs Mum Kim and also having a daughter the same age as Tallulah, it just gave me shivers and I couldn’t help imagining what I would do in her situation and I had to get to the end to find out what the heck was going on.
Joanne Froggatt is the narrator for The Night She Disappeared and she has done a fantastic job, I got a few chapters in and I forgot she was narrating it and felt like it was the characters actually speaking to me. Just incredible.
The Night She Disappeared is twisty, gripping, terrifying because it feels real, like it could happen or has happened and it’s just down right unputdownable. This is a story that you need to put on your tbr, whether it be book or audio. It’s definitely highly recommended by me.
I’d like to say a massive thank you to Georgie at Penguin Books for the gifted audiobook via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
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