 gone girl by gillian flynn a contender for the 2013 women s prize for fiction this is a quirky tangled thriller which speeds along at a cracking pace the story concerns the disappearance one morning of beautiful smiling allamerican amy the perfect wife the glamorous new yorker the blonde innocent 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 highflying manhattan career and had to pack up his new york life and new york wife and return to his missouri hometown 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 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 i was starting to get very tired of perfect prim applepieamy 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 overturning of any neat assumptions you d made 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  oh come on   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 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 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 gone girl is published by weidenfeld nicolson book review gillian flynn archive f 