It's been almost a year since Billie Flanagan disappeared, leaving her husband and teenaged daughter to pick up the pieces. She spent a weekend hiking alone in Desolation Wilderness, and all that was found was a cell phone, broken at the bottom of a ravine, and one shoe. Now, on the anniversary of her death, her husband Jonathan is getting ready to go to court to have her legally declared dead. He's been coping by drinking too much and avoiding creditors while working on a memoir of their loving marriage.
Meanwhile, his daughter Olive is struck one day at school by a vision of her mother that is so realistic that Olive inadvertently walks into a wall trying to get to her. She sees her mother on a beach, alive, reaching out to her. While her father is distant and lost in his own thoughts much of the time, Olive decides to follow her vision and try to find her mother.
As Jonathan gets together the paperwork he needs for the court procedure, he starts to find things. $30,000 missing from their savings account. A phone number for a private investigator. A reference to a motel stay. Jonathan starts to investigate, to discover who his wife really was and what she was hiding from him.
Their search for Billie turns up lots of questions, but what is the truth? Did she go see the parents she had refused to visit since she left as a teenager? Did she have a lover? Did she really die in that wilderness? As Jonathan faces the truth that his marriage wasn't quite the ideal that his memoir was making it out to be, Olive is dealing with her own struggle to find out who she is without her mother's presence in her life. Both father and daughter find pieces of themselves that were both stronger and weaker due to Billie's out-sized personality, and they both have to find closure to their questions before they can move on with their lives.
Janelle Brown's Watch Me Disappear is a moving story of a family that is torn apart by a mystery and put back together, stronger, as the truths about their relationships emerged. It's a deep dive into the secrets we keep from those that we love, the parts of ourselves that we give up, and the price of those secrets and lies. Beautifully written and piercingly honest, Watch Me Disappear is one of the great thrillers of this summer. You don't want to miss this brutal and brilliant look at a family and the individuals that come together to make it whole.
Galleys for Watch Me Disappear were provided by Random House through NetGalley.com, with many thanks.