The Night She Disappeared

By Lisa Jewell, Penguin/Century, 2021, 400 pages
Reviewed by Ted Streuli, October 30, 2021

Nineteen-year-old Tallulah — Lulah to her friends — goes off on a date with her boyfriend, her baby’s father, leaving their infant at home with Lulah’s mother, Kim. Two years later, Kim still hopes she’ll find her daughter.

Lisa Jewell alternates taking the reader through the night of Tallulah’s disappearance and the preceding events with the resurrection of the case two years later, when mystery novelist Sophie moves to town and turns up a few new clues.

If that sounds just a bit too Jessica Fletcher for you, dismiss the thought. Jewell’s novel is a gem, the kind that kept me thinking, “Oh, I’ve got it now, but how is she going to fill the remaining 300 pages? She can’t possibly drag it out that long!”

She doesn’t. Because just when you think you’ve got it, right at the moment you get that smug, self-satisfied air because you’ve outwitted the author, Jewell reveals you’ve done nothing of the sort.

While “The Night She Disappeared” delivers enough twists and turns to make a roller-coaster engineer weep with envy, its beauty is in all the other facets, the character depth and sense of place that often get the short sheet in this genre.

Sophie has given up her precious big-city-girl lifestyle to follow her too-new boyfriend to the country, where he is to be the head teacher at a posh private school and she is to work on her next book in their cottage-on-campus. Neither the lifestyle nor the boyfriend, his children, or his ex turn out to be her cup of tea and she can’t get a word written, so she throws herself into unravelling the mystery of Lulah’s disappearance without stepping on anyone’s toes because, well, they’re British.

Kim, who relished being an empty nester at 40, finds herself raising another baby. Then the detective investigating the disappearance stirs something in her, which Jewell manages to make feel adorable, pathetic and a tad inappropriate all at once.

But the 24-carat characters are the teenagers. They’re full of angst, of course, but we get to see it from every angle: the rich, popular girl; the just-a-boy who is infatuated with her; the teenage mother; her controlling boyfriend; the siblings and the hangers-on. They’re drawn so artistically that even an old goat like me can feel Lulah’s conflict over the boyfriend she doesn’t really love and the rich girl she maybe does. Even better, Jewell lets us first see the damage and fear a controlling young man can cause, then shows us that a controlling young woman, the false savior to whom Lulah turns, can be even worse.

Jewell examines how the privileged think (the rules don’t apply to them), how the naïve are drawn in, how nice kids turn into prey at a bully’s hands, and how much each of us is willing to put down on a spin of the roulette wheel with the hope that the ball will drop into love and acceptance.

It’s easy, on this side of 60, to look at the teenagers who populate my house and see cardboard characters marching through the expected phases with the predictable eye rolls and sighs and silences.

Jewell reminds us that they’re people, that their emotions, their fears, their desires are as valid as our own and are felt all the more intensely because the world hasn’t numbed them yet. When you read it, consider the contrast between the cautious, tepid attraction of middle-aged Kim Knox and Detective Inspector Dominic McCoy, and the passionate, consequences-be-damned approach taken by the youthful Tallulah Murray and Scarlett Jacques.

“The Night She Disappeared” made me stay up too late, convincing myself that just one more chapter wouldn’t hurt. As with any decent suspense novel, I had to know what happened next in the hunt for Tallulah.

But in this case, I also wanted to know what happened to the characters because Jewell somehow got me to care about a bunch of angsty teenagers and a few of the adults around them.

It was a treasure.