Then She Was Gone

Then She Was Gone is a suspense novel by the British writer Lisa Jewell, published in 2017.

The story of the ten years in between is told in part through Ellie's own account, so the reader knows what happened to her long before the people looking for her do, and that structure makes the novel less a whodunnit than a study of a family that was divided by a disappearance and never quite reorganised. Laurel's marriage did not survive the loss, her other two children grew up in the shadow of the sister they hardly knew and her ex-husband has built a new life, and the book is attentive to how a decade of not knowing alters the people who are left. Her meeting with Floyd, and the child who shares Ellie's appearance and mannerisms, supplies the present-day plot, and the investigation that follows moves between Laurel's suspicion, the accounts of the people around Floyd and the record of a pregnancy that is difficult to explain. Jewell had written a long series of novels for younger readers and women's fiction before this, and this book is one of the ones that moved her towards domestic suspense.