Book Review: Watch Me Disappear

Watch Me Disappear

by: Janelle Brown

Publication Date:  July 11, 2017 *upcoming*
Finished on July 8, 2017

Synopsis:
Billie Flanagan has been missing for one year.  All that was found was her broken telephone and a one hiking boot alone in the wilderness.  It is one year later and her husband, Jonathan, and her daughter, Olive, are attempting to move forward with their lives.  Are main questions are: 1. Is Billie dead or alive?  2. If she is alive, where is she?  Why did she disappear?  3.  If she is dead, what happened?  Who killed her?  The story unfolds as, in alternating chapters, both Jonathan and Olive attempt to investigate Billie's disappearance one year after she goes missing.

My review:
I have been on a suspense/mystery/thriller kick lately, so this novel called out to me.  It was an interesting concept - what goes through people's minds when someone is missing, presumed dead?  How do loved ones cope and deal with the lack of closed doors?  Overall, I liked this book.  It was well-written - I found myself looking up words and highlighting multiple phrases because they just sounded SO GOOD!  For me, the writing made this book worth it.  This book has you guessing who did it until the Epilogue.  This was my first read of Janelle Brown's and you can bet I will be checking out her other work.

Where it fell short, were the story and the characters:

• Billie is hard to like, so its hard to mourn her disappearance.  She is self-righteous and annoying and I had difficulty even reading the start of the book when it was from her perspective.  Good riddance!
• Jonathan could NOT get his life in control.  He acted like a child, and while I've never personally had to mourn a spouse, I would hope for a bit more maturity, especially when raising a teenaged daughter.
• Speaking of teenaged daughters, I never really "got" Olive's visions.  In the end, were they medical?  Supernatural?  What was the point really?  I wish this had been re-written somehow.  I like my suspense totally in the realm of suspense and my fantasy to be totally fantasy, so its always a bit hard for me when they mix.
• The EPILOGUE.  I was actually pretty happy after the last real chapter of the book.  We still didn't really know what had happened, but I was okay with that.  It left a bit of mystery, much like how it would have played out in real life.  I won't give away any spoilers, but I wish I hadn't read the epilogue and had simply finished after the last chapter.  The epilogue almost moved this down to a 3 or 3.5 star read for me.  Too clean and wrapped up without the intrigue it had previously held.

Overall, I rate this 4/5 stars.  The writing was on point and watching Jonathan go through the stages of grief was pretty interesting.  The author keeps you guessing until the end, always suspecting different people and really not knowing what happened.

I received a free e-copy of this book from Netgalley in return for an honest review.  I highly recommend this book for suspense/mystery lovers.