Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

 

They were a magical couple.  Amy was beautiful, intelligent and rich.  Nick was charming and the kind of handsome women longed for.  Nick was a writer and Amy worked at a magazine setting quizzes.  They had a place in New York City fully paid for and a life of fun, friends and joy.  Their love and marriage was the one others held up as an example.

But things change.  As newspapers and magazines went under or online, both of them lost their jobs.  Amy's parents, authors who had made their fortune by a series of books called Amazing Amy and featuring Amy, had little call for books now that Amy was an adult.  They lost their money and borrowed almost all of Amy's trust fund.  

Amy and Nick went back to his home in Missouri which Amy despised.  Nick opened a bar with his twin sister, Margo, using the last of Amy's money.  His mother was dying of cancer and his father had dementia and was in a nursing home and he felt that he needed to be there.  Amy did nothing and soon there were cracks in the perfect marriage and then fissures and then canyons.  The pair quietly came to detest each other then not so quietly and soon there was open warfare.

Then came the morning that Amy wasn't there.  Nick reported her missing but soon the police started to suspect him.  It was the same story to them, stale marriage, wife missing, husband the perpetrator.  Amy's parents came to Missouri to show support and then suspicion.  Nick and Amy's secrets started to come out.  Nick had been having an affair for over a year.  Amy confided in a friend that she was pregnant and Nick didn't want the baby.  The police found Amy's diary in which she wrote that she was afraid of Nick.

An easy case or was it?  Nick insisted he was innocent and that Amy was out there somewhere, having set him up.  Could that be true?  Nick finds other victims of Amy's wrath over the years and they tell stories of a vindictive woman who could wait months or years to roll out a plan for punishment if she felt wronged.  What's the truth?

This book has been a blockbuster and made into a movie.  For whatever reason, I never read it until now but it was marvelous.  The characters of Nick and Amy are finely drawn and the reader sees how they were perfectly wrong for each other rather than the perfectly right impression they made.  The story is told by the alternating voices of Amy and Nick and the twists come hard and fast.  This book is recommended for mystery readers.