The Moment She Was Gone : A Novel

Amazon.com

It's an axiom of fiction as well as real life that a phone that rings in the middle of the night rarely portends good tidings. For Andy Gulliver, the protagonist of Evan Hunter's gripping new novel, it usually means that his peripatetic twin sister, Annie, is gone again, along with her tenuous hold on reality. Annie has been disappearing with no warning and reappearing just as unexpectedly ever since her adolescence, when she ran off to Sweden to find her first love, a boy she met on an earlier trip abroad with her family. However, the real, if unconscious, object of her search, as Hunter makes clear, is the father who abandoned the Gullivers years before. Annie's occasional postcards and letters from places as far-flung as Nepal and New Guinea offer just enough reassurance to enable Andy and their mother to maintain the illusion that there's nothing really wrong with her. Annie's increasing mental deterioration, like her family's implacable denial, is brilliantly depicted, and drives the narrative to its heavily foreshadowed but still shocking conclusion. Hunter, a master of suspense, is the author of 20 novels as well as countless police procedurals and detective stories, all of which are marked by the psychological acuity that suffuses this, his latest. --Jane Adams

From Publishers Weekly

Hunter tracks a woman's slow descent into the depths of schizophrenia through the eyes of her twin brother in his latest, a melodramatic novel that offers some suspense at the start before it slides into a series of mawkish, overwrought scenes in which Hunter picks apart the dynamic of an ill-fated, dysfunctional Jewish family. Andrew Gulliver is the first-person narrator, a New York teacher who learns that his flighty, erratic sister, Annie, has disappeared, leaving her family with no clue as to her destination or whereabouts. The initial momentum of that conceit quickly dissipates when Hunter embarks on a long, extended flashback in which he outlines Annie's previous disappearances. Most of her escapades are at least familiar, with the most obvious cliches being a trip to India to study with a yogi as well as a debacle in a Georgia bar with a libidinous redneck who turns out to be a cop. The adventure that leads to real trouble is a visit to Sicily, where Annie encounters several amorous locals and ends up being hospitalized after a nervous breakdown as a questionable drug treatment accelerates her schizophrenic tendencies. Hunter wears his heart on his sleeve in his compassionate, heartfelt prose, but the lengthy passages in which he dissects the family take the air out of the climax when Annie finally turns up. The book has a few effective sequences, particularly when Annie attacks Andrew's wife with a hammer and Andrew turns to his divorced spouse years later for support when Annie disappears. Those moments aside, this represents a drop-off in quality from Hunter's usually crisp, illuminating prose, and longtime readers and fans are likely to be disappointed. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.