POLISHED Gems
Want a twisty, turny binge read so gripping its pages seem to turn themselves? Knuckle-biting suspense as the tension mounts? The rug pulled from under your feet as you read? The ante upped to the point of vertigo?
Look no further than The Night She Disappeared, the new thriller from global bestseller Lisa Jewell. Its basic premise is every parent’s nightmare: a child who goes missing. In this case teenage mother Tallulah goes for a night out with her boyfriend Zach. A year later, she hasn’t come back home to her mum and her baby son.
‘A lot of my books are based around the idea of people going missing,’ says Lisa. A missing person creates more uncertainty than a dead one. ‘I don’t want them to be dead from the outset,’ she continues. ‘With a missing person you’re leaving everything open.’
Like Lisa’s other thrillers, including 2019’s The Family Upstairs and 2017’s Then She Was Gone, The Night She Disappeared feels incredibly tightly plotted. But Lisa, pulling the rug again, says she doesn’t plan her novels.
‘I just start with an idea and start writing.’ For someone whose books are so compellingly dark, she’s friendly and down to earth – albeit with an undercurrent of darkly sardonic humour. ‘The idea for this one was a body discovered in a beautiful Surrey village and the teacher arriving and being instructed to dig here.’
The teacher in question is Shaun, who arrives as headmaster to a posh boarding school with his new girlfriend Sophie, a cosy crime writer drawn into investigating the disappearance of local teen Tallulah when she spots a sign in the school
