When I started reading the eagerly anticipated "Gone Girl" (after working my way through a hold list of 14 people!) I was a little disappointed. While it seemed like a pretty good run-of-the-mill thriller (an ideal couple is set to celebrate their 5th wedding anniversary when the wife mysteriously disappears without a trace and mounting evidence naturally points towards the husband), I didn't see the WOW factor that everyone is talking about. Then I got to the middle of the book and things started to become more complicated. Flynn is an absolute master of character and plot development. I can just imagine the notes and graphs she must have had to keep track of psychological action in this novel!
Amy Elliott Dunne and her husband Nick started out as a beautiful couple with a seemingly charmed life. Amy is a 38-year-old New York trust-fund girl, the daughter of two renowned psychologists who have earned a fortune with their "Amazing Amy" children's book series by using events in their daughter's life as plot catalysts. Nick is 4 years younger than Amy, the handsome son of divorced parents, a writer who is downsized from his magazine job just around the time that Amy loses HER job. At the same time Nick's mother is diagnosed with cancer and the couple decides to make the move to Nick's Missouri hometown to help care for his mother and his father, who suffers from Alzheimer's. After Amy purchases a business, a bar called "The Bar," for Nick and his twin sister Margo (known as "Go") with part of her trust fund, her parents request a loan of $650,000 (essentially all of her remaining money) to avoid financial ruin after some bad investments threaten to ruin them.
Each year on their July 5 anniversary Amy presents Nick with a complicated quiz composed of a series of clues that will ultimately lead him to his gift, a tradition that has become increasingly annoying to Nick with each passing year. Before Nick has the chance to even buy Amy's 5-year gift, he receives a call from a neighbor in his half-deserted McMansion neighborhood (they rent) that the Dunne's front door is wide open and Amy's indoor cat is outside on the stoop. When Nick arrives home he discovers that Amy is missing and there are signs of some sort of struggle in the living room.
The story alternates between Nick's experiences in the aftermath of Amy's disappearance and Amy's diary entries for the past 5 years, which detail an initially loving partnership that has deteriorated into a stressful and complicated love-hate relationship punctuated by fear on Amy's part. As Nick begins following Amy's anniversary clues the reader comes to the realization that all is not as it seems. The police are beginning to doubt Nick's devotion to his wife, the press have convicted him as a wife-killer, and he is being hounded mercilessly from all sides. Even Amy's loving parents begin to doubt his sincerity.
I can't say any more about how the story unfolds without ruining the plot for you. My advice is to read it. The complicated, multi-layered plot and the constantly evolving characters will shock and delight you. Might I say that you will be well and truly thrilled by it all?
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