Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Emlyn’s father abandoned her and her mother when Emlyn was a child, and the trauma has colored her entire life.  Shy and fearful of the world, her life changes when she goes to college and meets Janessa.  But are all the changes for the best?

Janessa is everything Emlyn isn’t–beautiful, popular, at ease in all situations, and wealthy.  And for a reason Emlyn can’t figure out, Janessa is eager to be her friend.  Janessa describes their closeness like that of Anne Shirley and Diana Barry in the Anne of Green Gables novels, that they are “bosom friends” and always will be.

And so they remain until Emlyn meets Tyler, Janessa’s neighbor and friend from childhood.  There’s an immediate attraction between Emlyn and Tyler, but he starts slowly, taking her for ice cream and lunches and picnics.

After several dates Emlyn tells her friend that she and Tyler are seeing each other, and Janessa is appalled.  “Tyler is the ultimate Regrettable,” she warns Emlyn, but she won’t say more than that.  So when Tyler comes calling again and Emlyn chooses him over Janessa, she and her “bosom friend” have a major falling-out.

The Nature of Disappearing goes back and forth in time–when we first meet the child Emlyn, when she sets off for college and meets Janessa, when she and Tyler begin their relationship, and the current time when Emlyn has become a hunting and fishing guide in Idaho.  She and Janessa have stilted, infrequent phone conversations a few times a year, but she hasn’t seen or heard from Tyler in the several years since his behavior left her close to death at the side of a road.

Then Tyler re-enters her life.  She’s at work when he enters her workplace.  He starts the conversation apologetically, saying he knows his visit is unexpected, but it’s about Janessa.  “…I think she’s in trouble, and I need your help.”

Janessa and her partner/lover Bush have become social media stars, traveling around the country, working for Tyler’s company.  Now it’s been a couple of weeks since they’ve been in touch with Tyler–no posts, no phone calls, no texts.  “Something’s wrong.  I can feel it.  And I have to find her.”

Despite her unresolved feelings about Tyler and her fear that being with him again may endanger her hard-fought satisfaction with her new life, Emlyn agrees to go with him to locate the missing pair.  After all, in spite of everything that happened between them, no one has come close to replacing Janessa in Emlyn’s life.

In The Nature of Disappearing, Kimi Cunningham Grant has written an extraordinary thriller.  Emlyn, Janessa, and Tyler are portrayed so realistically, warts and all, that the reader is able to empathize with them about their behavior and at the same time become angry at what they are doing to themselves and each other.  This is a crime novel that asks questions about life, love, and relationships that are not easy to answer.

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Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her website.  In addition to book review posts, there are sections featuring Golden Oldies, Past Masters and Mistresses, and an About Marilyn column that features her opinions about everything to do with mystery novels.