One Night Gone ~ Tara Laskowski
Genre: Mystery/Thriller
Published: October 2019, HARLEQUIN – Graydon House Books (U.S. & Canada)
Swathi’s Rating: 4/5
Verdict: Easy breezy suspense thriller to enjoy with a glass of wine!
Hey guys!
Hope you’re having a wonderful week just like me. So, I have been searching for a book to binge read and basically had a checklist to suit my current mood. So glad that I bumped into One Night Gone because this book checks every point I had in mind and thoroughly enjoyed snuggling with it!
- Beach setting ✔
- Gorgeous mansion overlooking the sea ✔
- A small, colorful fairy-tale like town ✔
- A mysterious blast from the past ✔
- Strong Women leads ✔
- Good food and wine ✔
- Crisp chapters with twisty chapter endings ✔
So if you’re looking for a book that checks all these points, then I must recommend you to pre-order One Night Gone without a second thought!! Happy reading xx
Plot:
A dual-narrative suspense novel about a recent divorcee house sitting in a wealthy beach town who becomes obsessed with the mysterious disappearance of a teenage girl there decades before—but the truth might not be the most shocking part of all.
Part electric coming-of-age story and part breathtaking mystery, One Night Gone is an atmospheric novel about power, privilege, and sisterhood from Agatha Award-winner Tara Laskowski.
One sultry summer, Maureen Haddaway arrives in the wealthy town of Opal Beach to start her life anew—to achieve her destiny. There, she finds herself lured by the promise of friendship, love, starry skies, and wild parties. But Maureen’s new life just might be too good to be true, and before the summer is up, she vanishes.
Decades later, when Allison Simpson is offered the opportunity to house-sit in Opal Beach during the off-season, it seems like the perfect chance to begin fresh after a messy divorce. But when she becomes drawn into the mysterious disappearance of a girl thirty years before, Allison realizes the gorgeous homes of Opal Beach hide dark secrets. And the truth of that long-ago summer is not even the most shocking part of all…
Book’s setting: the Jersey Shore
Swathi’s Thoughts:
When Allison gets a chance through her sister to house-sit a gorgeous mansion overlooking the sea in the small town of Opal Beach, she has second thoughts. She is recently divorced from her cheating husband, lost her job and the house she used to live in for years and currently living in a tiny room in her sister’s apartment at 35. Allison was a weather forecaster doing a live TV show until she blasted her cheating husband live on TV and lost everything. Hoping that the house and the new town will give her a break from all the known faces, she decides to give it a try. Soon, she is drawn in to the beauty of the gorgeous house and tiny town of Opal Beach, where people were close knit and knows each other’s businesses.
However she is intimidated by the disappearance of a young woman back in 1986 from Opal Beach, never to be seen again. It seems to Allison that no one in the town gave a damn for the girl or what happened to her, and that her want to know about Maureen and bring proper justice. Thereby begins her quest as the word spreads fast within the town and Allison finds herself amidst huge drama that is more dangerous than it seems.
The story is narrated from the PoVs of two women – Allion in the present and Maureen in the 1980s. Two different storylines happening in different time periods shuffle from chapter to chapter hooking the readers from the first page. Both women are very different from each other – their ages and brought up totally opposite yet the two stories somehow gets tangled into an intriguing web. At every point, my brain was working with so many theories and assumptions out of which only few turned out to be a right guess!
I was totally teleported to the sandy beaches of the little town whose descriptions were a sight for sore eyes. I love it when a book has good food and wine and Tara Laskowski makes sure her readers gets the perfect treat filled with fun and suspense throughout the chapters. I highly recommend this book to all thriller lovers who would want to cuddle with a light hearted, not-so-dark, suspense thriller over the weekend!
Many thanks to the publisher for my E-galley. All opinions mine and no way biased.
Meet the Author:
TARA LASKOWSKI is the Agatha Award-winning author of two short story collections, Modern Manners for Your Inner Demons and Bystanders, which was named a best book of 2017 by Jennifer Egan in The Guardian. She has had stories published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Mid-American Review, and the Norton anthology New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction, among others. Her Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine story, “States of Matter,” was selected by Amy Hempel for the 2017 Best Small Fictions anthology, and her short story “The Case of the Vanishing Professor” is a finalist for the 2019 Agatha Award. Tara was the winner of the 2010 Santa Fe Writers Project’s Literary Awards Prize, has been the editor of the popular online flash fiction journal SmokeLong Quarterly since 2010, and is a member of Sisters in Crime. She earned a BA in English with a minor in writing from Susquehanna University and an MFA in creative writing from George Mason University. Tara grew up in Pennsylvania and lives in Virginia. One Night Gone is her first novel. Visit her website at TaraLaskowski.com or on Twitter, @TaraLWrites.
