Good as Gone

Good as Gone by Amy Gentry
Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on July 26th 2016
Genres: Thriller, Psychological
Pages: 288
Format: eBook
Source: NetGalley & Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Thirteen-year-old Julie Whitaker was kidnapped from her bedroom in the middle of the night, witnessed only by her younger sister. Her family was shattered, but managed to stick together, hoping against hope that Julie is still alive. And then one night: the doorbell rings. A young woman who appears to be Julie is finally, miraculously, home safe. The family is ecstatic—but Anna, Julie’s mother, has whispers of doubts.  She hates to face them. She cannot avoid them. When she is contacted by a former detective turned private eye, she begins a torturous search for the truth about the woman she desperately hopes is her daughter.

**Special thanks to NetGalley & Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for supplying my copy of this book in exchange for an honest and unbiased review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.**

Can the return of a lost child be worse than losing her? Good as Gone is the mesmerizing debut psychological thriller by Amy Gentry.

The book has quite a breathtaking start. The thirteen year old Julie is abducted from her home in the middle of the night. Her younger sister Jane witnesses this. Too scared to move, Jane hides in the closet. And with a gesture from her sister asking her to keep quiet, Jane stays in the closet for almost three hours unable to move. And just like that, Julie is taken!

Eight years later, the family finds a young women by their door. She’s Julie and she’s back! Now with all of this right at the beginning of the book, we know there’s a lot more to this story. The family are so happy. Hearing what Julie had been through, abducted in what looks like human trafficking, they are now trying their best to compensate her for the hard years. They are trying to bond with her and give her all the joys she had missed.

But something is off. Julie doesn’t seem to be Ok. Moreover, she is hiding something. Anna, the mother, is determined to know what’s going on. In an intense and thrilling sequence of events, a lot unravels. It seems as if they all never knew each other enough!

The structure of this book is one of the most amazing things about it. The reappearance of Julie, or who claims to be Julie, acts as the center point of the whole story. The whole book moves forward and backward from this point. The author moves backward, one step back at a time to tell the story. This was quite amazing. She just gives the reader the chance to link these backward steps together. While at the same time, the story moves forward from the point of Julie’s reappearance. Finally, the ends meet and the whole picture is unraveled.

The story was mesmerizing with twists and turns. Having read so many mysteries and thrillers, it’s great to find a book that surprises me. I think as I said before, the new structure of the story helped a lot. Most mysteries and thrillers that use the ‘then’ and ‘now’ structure tell the ‘then’ story write from where it all started reaching to the ‘now’. This book was different. The ‘then’ story starts from the ‘now’ and moves one step back at a time. In doing this, you use all your guessing skills to guess the whole story based on the steps backward and forward that you have reached. But, once the author reveals one more backward step, you redo your guessing all over again. And so on it goes. Amazing!

Amy Gentry did a very good job with this book. I think with such book as her debut, I will be waiting impatiently to read her upcoming books. Great story. Great writing style.