Following Sophie's enquiries felt like the cosy crime she is famous for (in Scandinavia anyway) and the psychological games deployed by some manipulative characters in the book kept me on the edge of my seat. The Night She Disappeared is part domestic noir, psychological thriller and mystery and I was heavily invested in finding out what happened that night. Tallulah's mother Kim is left literally holding the baby, and we have access to all three character perspectives throughout the novel. Living on the school grounds, Sophie is the head teacher's girlfriend and a cosy crime author suffering from writer's block who chooses to distract herself by looking into the cold case of the missing teenagers. Tallulah is in the dark.'Wow, what a way to start a book! From there, the reader is introduced to Tallulah, a young teenage Mum who is missing along with her boyfriend after attending a friend's party. The hard ' ack' at the end of the second syllable suggestive of the repulsive angles of a spider's legs the soft sweep of the the ' fo' like the awful wave of nausea that washes through your gut at the suggestion of a sudden movement across a wall or floor the loud ' no' at its centre the sound of your brain screaming, in disgust, nononono. It's one of those words that sounds as bad as that which it describes. REVIEWThe start of The Night She Disappeared had me by the throat immediately, with a skin crawling prologue about arachnophobia. At 4.30am Kim awakens to discover that Tallulah has not come home.įriends tell her that Tallulah was last seen heading to a pool party at a house in the woods nearby called Dark Place.Ģ018: walking in the woods behind the boarding school where her boyfriend has just started as a head-teacher, Sophie sees a sign nailed to a fence. Midsummer 2017: teenage mum Tallulah heads out on a date, leaving her baby son at home with her mother, Kim.Īt 11pm she sends her mum a text message. 'Mum, there's some people here from college, they asked me back to theirs.

The night she disappeared plot