A contender for the 2013 Women’s Prize for Fiction, this is a quirky, tangled thriller which speeds along at a cracking pace. </p>
The story concerns the disappearance one morning of beautiful, smiling All-American Amy, the perfect wife, the glamorous New Yorker, the blonde innocent. </p>
Suspicion turns on her husband, Nick, who realises things don’t look good for him. He admits he’s been sullen and distracted lately. He admits he’s been stressed since he lost his high-flying Manhattan career and had to pack up his New York life and New York wife and return to his Missouri home-town. He admits he’s been cheating on Amy with a local girl. But did he kill her? If not, who did? And is Amy even dead? Well, there’s no body…</p>
The chapters about Nick’s worry, pressure, and suspicion are interspersed with old diary entries from Amy where she frets about why her husband stays out so late, why he’s lost the gleam in his eye, why he doesn’t get her cute little jokes anymore.</p>
I was starting to get very tired of perfect, prim Apple-Pie-Amy but then the novel bucked and reared and threw me, and galloped off in a totally different direction. It transforms in an instant from telling the story of a suspicious, shifty husband and his irritatingly perfect wife and goes on a dazzling trajectory of shocks and twists and the ruthless over-turning of any neat assumptions you’d made. </p>
However, the price of this was that the plot became a bit unbelievable in places. It jolted into such a massive, complicated, rollicking thriller that, at times, I felt like saying ‘<i>oh, come on!</i>’ in disbelief. But I soon shrugged off this cynicism and decided to just accept the novel for what it was: daring, ambitious and very cleverly plotted. So what if it veers off into the unbelievable at times? </p>
It also has to be said that I detested both Amy and Nick. However, as the novel is driven by plot rather than character, this doesn’t necessarily spoil the book.</p>
It was a good read, but sacrifices a lot for the sake of its wild plot. There are far superior novels in contention for The Women’s Prize. </p>
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<i>Gone Girl</i> is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson
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