Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

This was a pretty good book.  By that, I mean, better than average, but not quite a five star-er.  Which, really, is darn good when you think about it, because five-star books are really something special, aren’t they?  They have that certain something . . . Anyway, as I was saying, Gone Girl is a pretty good book.

The story opens on the day of Nick and Amy’s fifth wedding anniversary.  Their marriage started out wonderfully enough, but over the course of five years, things have grown strained, to say the least.  On the day of their fifth anniversary, however, Amy has disappeared without a trace, and all signs point to foul play.  In fact, all signs point to Nick having murdered his beautiful wife.  And Nick isn’t doing himself any favors with the way he’s behaving – definitely not like a grieving, concerned husband.  Plus, he keeps having these unfortunate dreams about his wife, battered and bloodied.

Then there is Amy’s diary.  In it, she chronicles the seven-year period of her and Nick’s courtship and marriage, and how terribly wrong things went between them.  Poor Amy!  Uprooted and transplanted from New York to Missouri by her increasingly moody husband, she does everything she can to be a good, loyal, loving wife to him, but to no avail.  Things grow ever more sour as Nick grows ever more distant and angry, and finally, violent, until Amy confides in her diary that she’s afraid for her life.  Poor Amy.

It’s a riveting plot full of unexpected twists that kept me guessing.  Much of the first half felt almost “ripped from the headlines” – think Scott Peterson who was convicted of murdering his pregnant wife, Laci a number of years ago.  This tells such a story from the perpetrator’s and victim’s perspectives, but all is not as it appears on the surface.  The second half of the story seemed a little farfetched to me, and although the story is wickedly entertaining, you finally get the feeling that it’s populated by people who could never exist in real life.

Still, it moves at a good clip and keeps the adrenaline flowing.