TEXAS MYSTERY / SUSPENSE

Amy Gentry

Good as Gone: A Novel of Suspense

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Hardcover, 978-0-544-92095-8 (also available as an ebook, an audio book, and on Audible), 288 pgs., $23.00

July 26, 2016

Anna, Tom, and Jane are sitting down to dinner one night when the doorbell rings. Anna answers the door. “The first thing I see is her pale hair,” thinks Anna, “then her face … there’s something familiar about her.” Julie Whitaker has been gone for eight years, kidnapped from her bedroom at thirteen, “and just like that, the worst unhappens. Julie is home.” As the family tries to move forward, treading lightly, fault lines are exposed. When Anna gets a phone call from a private detective, he adds fuel to her dawning suspicions, and she begins to question this Julie’s identity. Is she or isn’t she?

Beginning with the exquisite tension of the prologue, Good as Gone, Austinite Amy Gentry’s debut novel, is by turns gripping, insightful, brutal, depressing, and hopeful. Gentry, a veteran of volunteer work helping victims of domestic and sexual violence, dives deep into murky psychological territory and sets up camp, empathically conveying the particular and disparate mindsets of small children, teenage girls, and grown women alike. Gentry’s portrait of contemporary American girlhood — attempting to grow up in a culture that pounds them about the head and shoulders with the message that their bodies are commodities (but don’t you dare presume the power to use it as such—this is reserved for men) — is devastating.

Anna, mother, wife, and university professor, is the practical one, the analytical one, the one who must believe, for her own sanity, that Julie is dead. Tom, father, husband, accountant, is the emotional one, the one who quits his job to devote his time to search efforts: collecting and administering donated funds for such things as reward money and billboards, creating Facebook pages and attending support groups. Jane, sister and troubled college freshman, was ten years old when Julie was taken, and the only witness. Gentry does a fine job of rendering the complicated relationship between Anna and Jane, who feels she’s been grievously neglected.

The fast-paced plot is carefully crafted, casually dropped hints are perfectly placed, details matter. Alternating narratives and shifting points of view demand close attention. The many startling plot twists are worthy of Gone Girl (with shades of Elizabeth Smart), the kind that confuse your brain as it struggles with learned cultural stereotypes that preclude possibilities, and then requires you to consider those possibilities. Gentry’s ingenious technique of working backward from the present, all the way back to before the beginning, to reveal how Julie became who she is now is particularly compelling.

In the end, Good as Gone is part thriller, part social critique, and wholly satisfying. I read Good as Gone in a single sitting because it wasn’t possible to not.