How Quickly She Disappears
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3.6 • 21 Ratings
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
As seen in PEOPLE • Entertainment Weekly • New York Post Best Book of the Week
“A novel paced like a thriller but written with the aching grace of literary fiction. A gorgeously dark, harrowing debut.”—Riley Sager, New York Times bestselling author of Lock Every Door
The Dry meets The Silence of the Lambs in this intoxicating tale of literary suspense, set in the relentless Alaskan landscape, about madness and obsession, loneliness and grief, and the ferocious bonds of family....
It's been twenty years since Elisabeth’s twin sister, Jacqueline, disappeared without a trace. Now thirty-year-old Elisabeth is living far from home in a small Alaskan town. She's in a loveless marriage and has a precocious young daughter she loves more than anything but who reminds her too much of her long-missing sister.
But then Alfred, a dangerous stranger with a plan of his own, arrives in town and commits an inexplicable act of violence. And he offers a startling revelation: He knows exactly what happened to Elisabeth's sister, but he'll reveal this truth only if she fulfills his three requests.
Increasingly isolated from her neighbors and imprisoned by the bitter cold and her own obsession, Elisabeth can almost hear her sister's voice saying, Come and find me. And so she will, even if it means putting herself—and her family—in danger.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set in 1941, Fleischmann's uneven debut focuses on Elisabeth Pfautz, who lives in Tanacross, Alaska (pop. 85), and has struggled for years to come to grips with the disappearance of her twin sister, Jacqueline, who was abducted in 1921 at age 11 near their home in Lititz, Pa. Dealing with her husband, to whom she's unhappily married, and their precocious 11-year-old daughter, occupies Elisabeth until the arrival of a stranger, Alfred Seidel, who proceeds to murder one of her friends. To Elisabeth's shock, the incarcerated Seidel asks to talk to her after his arrest. Seidel tells her he knows who took Jacqueline and her current location, but Elisabeth must give him "three gifts" for the information. Elisabeth's desire to find out Jacqueline's abductor's identity and where she might be keeps the tension high, but main characters who don't behave in realistic ways and the distracting usage of second-person point of view for the flashbacks will put off many readers. A disappointing ending caps a novel that works better as an evocation of a certain time and place than a mystery.
