All the Missing Girls

All the Missing Girls
by Megan Miranda
Published June, 2016

Obviously, it can be difficult to find a truly unique book, but one of my pet peeves is the tendency of publishers to declare that each and every new suspense novel is "the next Gone Girl" or, more recently "the next Girl on the Train". According to the blurb, All the Missing Girls is "Like the spellbinding psychological suspense in The Girl on the Train and Luckiest Girl Alive, Megan Miranda's novel is a nail-biting, breathtaking story about the disappearances of two young women..."

Let's be clear here - All the Missing Girls is nothing at all like The Girl on the Train; it's set in rural Cooley Ridge in the southern US, rather than London. The stories are different. The characters are different. The timelines are different. There is one real similarity between the two though - they are both very, very good.

All the Missing Girls follows Nicolette Farrell as she returns to her childhood hometown, ten years after her best friend Corinne disappeared without a trace. In town temporarily to fix up her childhood home for sale, Nicolette is swept up into spookily familiar events as another local girl is reported missing. Through various twists and turns, Nicolette starts to shed light on events long forgotten as the truth comes out about the two disappearances, a decade apart.

Starting out in a fairly straightforward manner, the narrative of All the Missing Girls takes a sudden U-turn once Nicolette arrives in Cooley Ridge - we jump forward in time to fifteen days after the second disappearance and the rest of the novel is told in reverse, from Day 15 to Day 1.

This is an original take on a suspense novel and could go really badly wrong - and it almost does. This is not a novel that you can put down for a few days and come back to; you will be completely confused about where we're up to, what bits have already happened and what on earth in happening. It requires quite a bit of concentration to follow the story and it is frustrating at times, but ultimately Megan Miranda pulls it off nicely, turning a potential narrative gimmick into a unique way of building suspense.

I'm guessing that Cooley Ridge looks a bit like this

 Every character in All the Missing Girls is more than they seem, with both flaws and redeeming features coming out of the woodwork as more of the past emerges. Nicolette herself is a great character, equal parts strong and vulnerable with her desire to stay far away from Cooley Ridge conflicting with her affection for her hometown and family. Her high-school boyfriend Tyler is likeable and sweet, but the missing girl is his girlfriend and he doesn't seem at all concerned. Nic's brother Daniel is sensible and family-focused but has an apparent history of violence. Even Nic's dementia-affected father is three-dimensional, his years of alcoholism and history of poor parenting conflicting with a devotion to his children and a need to protect them. This cast of complicated characters adds a certain depth to what would otherwise be a fast-paced but not-particularly-meaningful story.

All the Missing Girls is original,gripping and complex. To follow the story properly, you really need to read it all in one sitting but that's really not asking much - the cracking pace and twists-and-turns narrative mean that this is a hard one to put down.

8/10

Before the Fall

Before the Fall
by Noah Hawley
Published May, 2016

Noah Hawley is a successful TV writer and producer - with Peabody, PEN, Emmy and Golden Globe wins to his name, Hawley is the creator of the fabulous Fargo TV series and now (just to show that he can apparently do everything) he's released a fantastic new novel.

Before the Fall begins with a tragedy. En route from Martha's Vineyard to New York, a private plane crashes into the sea. On board are ten members of New York's wealthy elite and one near-penniless artist, hitching a ride with his wealthy neighbours. There are only two survivors - one is artist Scott Burroughs and the other is the four-year-old son of the plane's billionaire media-mogul owner.

Chapter by chapter, Before the Fall skips back and forward in time, following the survivors and the victims' families in the weeks after the crash, then going back to uncover more of the lives of the plane's passengers and crew beforehand. The narrative focuses on one character at a time, painting a rich and detailed background for each of them and adding more layers to the mystery of what went wrong. The controversial newsman; the ex-cult-member pilot; the businessman being investigated for fraud; each chapter adds another piece to a fairly complicated puzzle, with the cause of the crash seeming less and less obvious with every page.

Apparently Martha's Vineyard looks like this. Not a bad spot, really...

At its heart, Before the Fall is a whodunnit (Why did the plane crash? What happened? Whose fault was it?) and it works well, building layers of backstory throughout and creating more questions than answers around the various characters and their potential involvement in the crash. But there's more to it than that - I found that I'd largely forgotten about the whole who-caused-the-crash question, because I was so caught up in the stories of each of these characters and so interested in what would happen next.
There is certainly an element of suspense, but Before the Fall is less of a thriller and more of a sophisticated mystery, full of complexities and well-developed characters. The movie rights to the book have already been snapped up, but I'm not sure how well it will translate to the big screen - the storyline of Before the Fall is really quite simple and it's the strength of the characters that really set the book apart. It will be interesting to see how this is handled on film, but I'm sure Noah Hawley is more than capable of figuring it out.

Before the Fall is sure to be popular. It's well-written, suspenseful and compulsively readable - I would be very surprised if it's not a best-seller. But there is more depth to Before the Fall than what you'd normally find in this kind of novel - there are questions posed about the intrusiveness of the media into the stories they report on and the sensationalisation of the news as the lines become more and more blurred between news reporting and entertainment television. Questions about what makes someone a "hero" nowadays and what we expect from the people put on these pedestals. Even questions about the relationships between people and the meaning of family. It might read with the pacing of a lightweight mystery novel but there's also some substance there to really sink your teeth into and the characters will stay with you long after you finish the book. Finding out what happened to the plane - well, it's almost beside the point.

This really was a great read - highly recommended.

9/10