"Gone Girl" Gillian Flynn

 I am a thorn bush  bristling from the over attention of my parents, and he is a man of a million little fatherly stab wounds, and my thorns fit perfectly into them.” 

― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

I got this audible.com book because I had read Flynn's "Sharp Objects" a couple of times and loved getting to know the protagonist.  It was the treatment of the characters that I enjoyed, and it was inconsequential that the "Sharp Objects" was also a thriller.

I didn't really know what to expect from this book, and I'm glad I went into it blind.  I was immediately surprised to find that the main character, or at least the first introduced, was a man.  The story switches between the current day activities of Nick Dunne and his wife's diary that starts before they were married.  These two narratives tell very different stories about their life together.  We soon find that in the current day Amy Dunne is missing, and it is possible that husband Nick is involved with the disappearance.

It took a little while for me to get into the book.  I was hoping for dark and tragic figures like in "Sharp Objects", but Nick and Amy's marriage seems too idyllic for my tastes.  They are smarter and more beautiful than anyone else.  Where was the drama, the tension?  But a little patience paid off as we started seeing the dark side, or should I say sides, of the characters.

As police detectives pursue the missing person's case, which is splattered over the media because Amy is the namesake of a popular character in the children's books written by her psychologist parents, Nick is pursuing the clues to an anniversary gift left for him before his wife's disappearance.  The reader is manipulated to first believe that Nick is innocent, and then guilty, and then...

The book is about deception.  How husband's and wives deceive either other, how they deceive their family and friends and, maybe most importantly, how we deceive ourselves.  The book also takes the media to task by showing how it manipulates the facts to play to the audience and how we are quick to implicate the husband as an "eraser killer" a la Marilee Strong.  In both instances, everyone sees either what they want to see or what others have set them up to see.  The clues are deftly written to be interpreted in many ways by both the characters and the reader.

While the characterization of Amy is almost comical and that of Nick was sometimes hard to follow, the fun was in unraveling the mystery.  Predictable at times, there was still some surprising developments to keep me interested.  The end was open ended and chilling.

I have heard that people who liked "Sharp Objects" and Flynn's other novel, "Dark Places," found this a departure from the style of those books.  Well, then brava for Flynn.  My recommendation for this book is that I actually sat and listened to the book for several hours without trying to multitask as usual.  A book has to be very entertaining for me to devote time to just listening to it instead of waiting for a long walk or a car trip to Des Moines for the next installment.