They were a magical couple. Amy was beautiful, intelligent and rich. Nick was charming and the kind of handsome women longed for. Nick was a writer and Amy worked at a magazine setting quizzes. They had a place in New York City fully paid for and a life of fun, friends and joy. Their love and marriage was the one others held up as an example.

But things change. As newspapers and magazines went under or online, both of them lost their jobs. Amy's parents, authors who had made their fortune by a series of books called Amazing Amy and featuring Amy, had little call for books now that Amy was an adult. They lost their money and borrowed almost all of Amy's trust fund.

Amy and Nick went back to his home in Missouri which Amy despised. Nick opened a bar with his twin sister, Margo, using the last of Amy's money. His mother was dying of cancer and his father had dementia and was in a nursing home and he felt that he needed to be there. Amy did nothing and soon there were cracks in the perfect marriage and then fissures and then canyons. The pair quietly came to detest each other then not so quietly and soon there was open warfare.

Then came the morning that Amy wasn't there. Nick reported her missing but soon the police started to suspect him. It was the same story to them, stale marriage, wife missing, husband the perpetrator. Amy's parents came to Missouri to show support and then suspicion. Nick and Amy's secrets started to come out. Nick had been having an affair for over a year. Amy confided in a friend that she was pregnant and Nick didn't want the baby. The police found Amy's diary in which she wrote that she was afraid of Nick.

An easy case or was it? Nick insisted he was innocent and that Amy was out there somewhere, having set him up. Could that be true? Nick finds other victims of Amy's wrath over the years and they tell stories of a vindictive woman who could wait months or years to roll out a plan for punishment if she felt wronged. What's the truth?

This book has been a blockbuster and made into a movie. For whatever reason, I never read it until now but it was marvelous. The characters of Nick and Amy are finely drawn and the reader sees how they were perfectly wrong for each other rather than the perfectly right impression they made. The story is told by the alternating voices of Amy and Nick and the twists come hard and fast. This book is recommended for mystery readers.

Truly feel so lucky that I got to read Gone Girl early. It was my first Gillian Flynn novel and I immediately went out and bought the rest and read them. So good, just such a unique experience.

This is an excellent thriller that will keep readers engaged throughout. The characters are so dysfunctional but so interesting. Twists and turns to keep readers guessing. I highly recommend.

Just when you think you know who you should like while reading this book the next chapter changes your mind. This book takes Fatal Attaction to a whole new level.

Look. I read this a long time ago and though I reviewed it here. Where did my review go? I have no idea. What I do know is that this book was an amazing romp, and you've likely already seen the movie and think you don't need to read the book. But listen... if you haven't seen the movie and you haven't read the book, you totally owe it to yourself to read this book. It's full of surprises and the architecture of the book is just glistening... like some kind of remarkable jewel that could only be cut by a wizard. Honestly a thrilling read.

Published by Crown on June 5, 2012

One thing I’ve learned from reading Amazon book reviews is that many readers say they dislike books unless they like (or can identify with) a main character. Why, then, was Gone Girl such a huge success? The two principal characters, Nick and Amy, are despicable. They are selfish, self-absorbed, dishonest, and (at least with regard to one of those characters) totally evil. Yet readers love this book, and with good reason. Maybe Gone Girl will help readers understand that good fiction does not depend upon likable, virtuous characters.

I came late to Gone Girl. It’s likely that the basics of the plot are well-known but it shouldn’t be spoiled for those readers who haven’t opened the book (or seen the movie), so I will say little about it. Nick and Amy are married. Amy’s parents made good money writing a series of children’s books called Amazing Amy. Sales have dwindled in recent years and Amy’s parents have borrowed from her trust fund. Meanwhile, Nick and Amy both lost their New York publishing jobs. They move to Nick’s hometown in the Midwest, where Nick uses the last of their savings to open a bar with his sister Go. Financial burdens place a strain on their marriage.

And then Amy disappears. Disorder in the home suggests that she might have been kidnapped, but the police think the scene has been staged. A police investigation uncovers a series of clues that suggest Nick has done away with Amy. That’s all I’ll say about the plot.

The story is creative and original. It alternates point of view between Nick and Amy and, in so doing, causes the reader to reevaluate the two characters. Neither are people you’d want to have as neighbors, much less friends. But they are realistic characters, imbued with the kind of detail that brings them to life in a reader’s mind. At first, I disliked the two characters because one was too perfect and the other was too self-indulgent. Later I disliked them for entirely different reasons. The way Gillian Flynn transforms the reader’s perception of both characters as the story moves forward is the novel’s most impressive feature.

Flynn offers some strong insights into the nature of marital relationships, and more generally into the nature of men and women as they are and as they pretend to be. I also like the way she skewers self-righteous media stars (one is clearly a stand-in for Nancy Grace) who vilify men despite the absence of proof or a fair trial, happily destroying lives for the sake of ratings.

Flynn's prose is filled with wickedly clever sentences. This is an absorbing novel from start to twisted finish. If there are two characters in recent fiction readers might love to hate more than Amy and Nick, I don’t know who they are. Gone Girl is proof that readers don’t need to love the characters to love a work of fiction.

RECOMMENDED

This is the book that revitalized/popularized the psychological suspense/unreliable narrator genre. It is a brilliantly conceived, well-plotted mystery with truly unlikable characters. I read it -- or at least half of it. At which point, I realized that I did not like either of these characters and did not care what happened to them. Why waste time reading things that do not make you happy, right?