Rating: 4 Stars
It had me at the first
page, and kept me hooked till the last. So many ‘suspense’ novels telegraph
their grand climax well before the reader is half-way through that, we nearly
forget the enjoyable sensation of being kept on tenterhooks. It’s nice to get
an occasional reminder once in a while.
Nick Dunne, on the day
of his fifth anniversary returns home to find his wife, Amy, missing. He calls
in the police, and the search begins in the small town of Carthage, Missouri.
The evidence points all too damningly to the usual suspect in such cases. While
there may be more than one side to any story, Nick’s perspective on his tottery
marriage and his spouse does not win him much sympathy. The scariest place to
be is inside someone’s head, and Flynn leads us into the darkest nooks and
crannies of her protagonists’. The distinction between being a self-absorbed
jerk and a narcissistic psychopath may be merely a difference of degrees.
Predictably the hunt
for Amy soon turns into the usual media circus; with ratings-hungry talk-show hosts quivering with self-righteous outrage, slick attorneys, and casual
acquaintances avid for their fifteen minutes in the spotlight.
Gone Girl
scores an enviable double whammy. It’s a thriller that beckons with a promise
of sexy, wicked fun, and before we know it, has us by the throat with its
ferocious intelligence and startlingly acute insight.
There are some questionable angles, but it’s easy to overlook those when the author has gratified
in so many other respects. One of the charms of this book is the way it slyly
upends clichés – the lawyer who is the go-to guy for uxoricide suspects is apparently happily married; romance’s cherished ideal of a knight in shining armor is not
every girl’s idea of the perfect man; incorrigible love-birds are annoying to
the rest of us, as Nick nastily remarks on his grieving in-laws "cherishing
each other" every chance they get. And while hope may be ‘the thing with
feathers’, love can and does sport scales, fangs, and claws.
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