Tag Archives: Lisa Jewell

#BookReview ‘Then She Was Gone’ by @lisajewelluk #thriller

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Then She Was Gone by Lisa Jewell is a delight, the page-turning story of a disappeared teenager whose experience was something I did not expect. An excellent un-thriller; that’s a phrase I use after giving it some thought. This is not a psychological thriller in that it is frightening. It didn’t make my pulse race with a sense of danger, but it did make me very curious. Lisa JewellEllie Mack is fifteen the day she fails to come home from the library, she is due to take her GCSE examinations the following week. She is a clever student, a golden girl. But she disappears, never to be seen again. Life goes on. Except it doesn’t for her family, each being trapped in some way by Ellie’s absence. Until ten years later when Ellie’s mum Lauren, now divorced, meets a nice bloke in a café. Her ex, Paul, has a new partner and so do Ellie’s siblings. Laurel is the one who is really stuck, visiting her elderly mother bed-ridden after a stroke. Then she meets Floyd and his daughters Poppy and SJ, and she blossoms.
I would like to say from the beginning I had unsettling feelings of the ‘that’s not quite right’ variety, but I didn’t. Instead the doubts crept in stealthily until the full truth dawned on me at 72% on my Kindle. And then it hit with a sledgehammer.
This is a clever book written by an author who has matured enormously over the years in the subjects she tackles.
Then She Was Gone doesn’t set out to be frightening, at least I don’t think that is the author’s primary intent. I think she started with a ‘what if’ scenario and let it unfold from there. It is a puzzle involving characters so real you feel you know them, that it could be happening to you; and that’s what makes it so powerful.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK AT AMAZON

And here are my review of two other thrillers by Lisa Jewell:-
I FOUND YOU
THE GIRLS

If you like this, try:-
‘The Good Girl’ by Mary Kubica
‘Chosen Child’ by Linda Huber
‘Stolen Child’ by Laura Elliot

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THEN SHE WAS GONE by @lisajewelluk http://wp.me/p5gEM4-2Td via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘I Found You’ by @lisajewelluk #thriller

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Alice Lake sees a man sitting alone on a beach in the rain and invites him into her home. He has lost his memory. When Lily’s new husband doesn’t come home from work, she goes to the police for help and discovers he has a false name. A family from Croydon take a traditional English holiday by the sea. These are the three storylines in I Found You by Lisa Jewell. The common denominator is location: a northern seaside town called Ridinghouse Bay. Lisa JewellTwo inter-connected themes run throughout I Found You. Memory – the fugue of the man on the beach, and the dementia suffered by Alice’s parents – and identity, disguised, mistaken, forgotten. Jewell is so good at writing believable characters, good at exploring human nature in a simple, accessible way. And though there is evil in this story, there is also good, kindness, humanity, heart.
The menace is subtle, building slowly from the beginning even when the connections are unclear. It’s just a feeling. Gray watches his younger sister being chatted up by Mark, an older teenager, and feels uneasy: ‘There was something just off about him. Something shadowy and cruel. There were too many angles in his face. Too much thought behind each gesture, each word, each action. Even his hair colour was too uniform, Gray felt, as though he could tug at it and mark’s whole face would come off to reveal his true identity, like a Scooby Doo villain.’
Alice is too easy to trust, it has got her into trouble before. But her least-trusting dog likes the man from the beach, who her youngest daughter names ‘Frank’. But even Frank doesn’t know if he is trustworthy. How much do you need to know about someone before you trust them? Is it dangerous to rely on instinct? Or is that the most reliable test?
Two things in the story rang untrue for me – the police today use mobile phone records and CCTV to quickly trace missing people; and the behaviour of some characters in the intervening years seems far-fetched. But that aside, this is a satisfying puzzle to solve.

And here are my review of two other thrillers by Lisa Jewell:-
THE GIRLS
THEN SHE WAS GONE

If you like this, try:-
‘The House on Cold Hill’ by Peter James
‘The Good People’ by Hannah Kent
‘Summer House with Swimming Pool’ by Herman Koch

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview I FOUND YOU by @lisajewelluk via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-2Lg

#BookReview ‘The Girls’ by @lisajewelluk #thriller

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It’s a long time since I read a Lisa Jewell novel. I loved her first, Ralph’s Party, which still sits on my bookshelf along with four of her other books. I gave up reading somewhere about Vince and Joy, turned off by the pink chick lit branding and feeling that I had grown-up beyond the subject matter. Lisa JewellThen I heard that The Girls was ‘something different,’ and it is. Satisfying dark, mysterious, unspoken danger lurks above the heads of the girls – Grace and Pip. The setting is outwardly comforting: a communal garden surrounded by houses and apartments, where residents mingle and have barbecues together, where children roam safe from roads and strangers. But are they safe? And what is the threat?
The two girls and their mother move to an empty apartment after the family home is burnt down by their father. He is now in psychiatric care, they lost all their belongings and walk cautiously into this cliquey community where everyone seems to know everyone else. Grace and Pip unknowingly trample onto secrets and the dynamics of teenage relationships, their mother Clare stumbles around the edge of tangled adult relationships, struggling to be there for her daughters while dealing with the betrayal of her husband. And at the centre of daily life is the garden, the hub of the wheel around which this community turns.
Then one hot summer’s day, Grace’s 13th birthday, it all comes to a head.
I finished this in two sittings, reading late into the night. A satisfying family thriller with hints of the truth and plenty of dodgy things to be suspicious about.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK AT AMAZON

And here are my review of two other thrillers by Lisa Jewell:-
I FOUND YOU
THEN SHE WAS GONE

If you like this, try:-
‘The Museum of Broken Promises’ by Elizabeth Buchan
‘Wolf Winter’’ by Cecilia Ekback
‘Five Days of Fog’ by Anna Freeman

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE GIRLS by @lisajewelluk via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1Fm