book review: Gone Without a Trace by Mary Torjussen

GONE WITHOUT A TRACE by Mary Torjussen
★☆☆☆☆
Berkley Books, 2017

This is a very strong contender for the worst book I have ever read. I’m not saying that lightly.

Gone Without a Trace is about Hannah, a thirty-something young woman living the dream – she’s got a house, a boyfriend, a steady job, and an imminent promotion. Until she comes home one day and finds that her boyfriend Matt has left her, in the most cold and calculated way possible – he’s moved out all of his stuff, erased his number from her phone, deleted the pictures of him off her computer, and deactivated all of his social media accounts. She literally has no way to contact him, and she has no idea why he left.

I love the premise. It sounds like a nightmare, for someone to forcibly remove him or herself from your life in such an extreme way. This book had all the potential in the world… but Mary Torjussen dropped the ball. Getting through this book was agonizing. The prose was some of the most juvenile I’ve ever seen – exclamation points everywhere and probably about 80% of the sentences starting with “I” (“I wondered why Matt would do this to me! I loved him! I needed to find him!” – those sentences are my own, but I think they condense the contents of this book rather nicely). I try not to judge thrillers on their literary merit, but come on. This was painful to read.

And on top of that, it was just insanely boring. Hannah literally spends months – about 60% of the novel – trying to track down Matt, even though all signs point to him having left voluntarily. Each of her fruitless efforts is recorded in excruciating detail – why do I care that she’s calling Matt’s barber? And now his mechanic? And now every hotel in the greater Liverpool area? (Why doesn’t she hire a private investigator? She has the money. She starts to go to such extreme lengths to find him, impersonating people, trying to trick them into divulging details; why wouldn’t she just hire a professional at this point? Nothing in this book makes sense.)

My other major annoyance throughout this book that I just want to mention briefly was Hannah’s relationship with her “best friend,” Katie. These two had one of the pettiest relationships I’ve ever seen – when will we stop depicting all female friendships as catty and competitive? That’s not real life. If you’re 32 years old and you’re still secretly trying to one-up everything your best friend does as if you’re still in middle school, maybe you should reevaluate this supposedly rock solid friendship. The characters in this book just don’t act like real people – they’re shoddy and offensive caricatures.

And then we get to the twist. No spoilers, but I just… I literally do not have the words to describe how dumb this ending was. It’s like the author was spinning a giant wheel of possible explanations including the likes of “aliens made them do it” and “it was all a dream” but instead landed on… whatever the hell we got instead. The ‘explanation’ we get to justify these characters’ behavior doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t fit with the information we’d had until that point, and not in the kind of way where if you went back to reread the beginning, you’d be able to read between the lines and see the truth lurking beneath. No, the explanation we get just doesn’t add up. The entire ending of this book is one big incongruous, plot hole-ridden mess. I’d have preferred the aliens, to be perfectly honest.

To impress upon you just how terrible this book was, I have to tell you that I literally started doing a dramatic reading for my roommate toward the end, because we were getting into straight up comical territory. I’m sorry, but how did this book get published? It wasn’t fast paced, it wasn’t a page turner, it wasn’t fun, it wasn’t creepy, it was just… bad. I would compare this book to a soap opera, but soap operas didn’t do anything to deserve that.

I received a copy of this book in a Goodreads giveaway. Thanks to the Goodreads First Reads program as well as the author and publisher for the opportunity. Sorry I didn’t click with this more!