Janelle Brown: Watch me disappear, 9780812989489, Spiegel & Grau (Penguin Random House US), paperback / No German translation yet.
 

The incredible success of “Gone Girl” saw an avalanche of similar titles in publishing.  Janelle Brown’s “Watch me disappear” falls into this genre but luckily does not fall into the category of those of questionable quality.  Janelle Brown’s” has written an entertaining, escapist novel with “Watch me disappear in keeping you captured until the end, with several outcomes possible. 

  

Billie Flanagan, a much loved Berkeley mother and wife, disappears during a Wilderness hike and no traces apart from one hiking boot and her shattered cell phone are found even after a year. Her husband Jonathan and her teenage daughter Olive are desperately trying to patch up their destroyed lives while having to go through the process of having Billie declared legally dead. 

When Olive starts to have strange visions of her mother, she is no longer convinced her mother is dead. But where is she, what happened to her and why has she disappeared?  While Olive is trying to do some research of her own, getting into trouble at school and with her father, Jonathan is writing a memoir of his and Billie’s life. He too harbors doubts when his stumbles over some inexplicable cash withdrawals and secrets Billie seems to have kept from him while doing research for the memoir.  Who really was this person he thought he knew inside out and loved so dearly? Jonathan and Olive eventually share their doubts; they decide they owe it to Billie to embark on a quest to find out whether she is truly dead. Some uncomfortable truth about Billie's past shakes them
both up putting the person they love in a new light.

The story of how we believe to know the person we love only to discover this to be untrue has been told before in many variations.  I enjoyed “Watch me disappear” as the story twists and turns, the characters are well drawn out and the author skillfully keeps you guessing.  However, it did not knock me off my socks.