{"id":7650,"date":"2021-09-10T16:13:27","date_gmt":"2021-09-10T16:13:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/?page_id=7650"},"modified":"2021-10-02T14:22:51","modified_gmt":"2021-10-02T14:22:51","slug":"the-night-she-disappeared","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/?page_id=7650","title":{"rendered":"The Night She Disappeared"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Lisa Jewell, The Night She Disappeared<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Review by Lee Horsley<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Lisa Jewell\u2019s\u00a0The Night She Disappeared<\/em>\u00a0 (2021) draws us in with an absorbing, beautifully crafted story that holds us in suspense throughout. As in Jewell\u2019s other novels, our attention is compelled not only by the intricate plotting but by characters so richly created and memorable that they stay in the reader\u2019s mind long after the final pages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The girl who has disappeared is nineteen year-old Tallulah Murray, a college student who lives with her mother in Upfield Common in the Surrey hills, together with her boyfriend Zach and their baby son. When Tallulah and Zach go for a rare night out at the local pub, they never return. The last time they were seen is at Dark Place, the old mansion of a rich acquaintance of Tallulah\u2019s called Scarlett Jacques. In a novel of proliferating mysteries, we are repeatedly brought back to the question of how the lives of two characters so apparently unlike one another became so closely intertwined:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 \u201cTallulah is a pretty girl, but looks like the sort of girl that likes to blend into the background, who doesn\u2019t like compliments or fuss, the sort of girl that likes routine and normality and simple food, who doesn\u2019t experiment with clothes or make-up in case she gets it wrong. Yet somehow she found herself embroiled in a Bohemian, self-centred family like the Jacqueses. How did it happen?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As we realise the extent of Tallulah\u2019s involvement with Scarlett and with the disturbing secrets of Dark Place, the tone of the narrative becomes increasingly Gothic and terrifying. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Jewell says in her Acknowledgements that she wrote The Night She Disappeared<\/em> during lockdown, when changes in life and family routine meant that she temporarily found herself unable to write. It is possibly an experience that fed into her creation of another of the novel\u2019s central characters, Sophie Beck, a writer of \u2018cosy crime\u2019 novels whose move to a new life in Upfield Common has left her suffering from writer\u2019s block. Instead of writing, she throws herself into trying to solve the village\u2019s year-old mystery of what happened on the night Tallulah and Zach disappeared. The writer as amateur sleuth is instrumental in propelling the investigation forward. Sophie\u2019s involvement also reinforces the reader\u2019s sense of how distant Jewell\u2019s strange and sinister world is from the comforting confines of old-fashioned crime writing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the end of the novel, Sophie, writing again, has decided that she will leave behind the conventions of cosy detection embodied in her Hither Green Detective Agency and move on to writing about \u201cthe wide world, not just one corner of it.” The Night She Disappeared<\/em>\u2013 perhaps such a novel as an older, more experienced Sophie might go on to write \u2013 is a darkly satisfying psychological thriller. Highly recommended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lisa Jewell, The Night She Disappeared  Review by Lee Horsley Lisa Jewell\u2019s\u00a0The Night She Disappeared\u00a0 (2021) draws us in with an<\/p>\n

Continue readingThe Night She Disappeared<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":779,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/7650"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/779"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7650"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/7650\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7710,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/7650\/revisions\/7710"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}