Title: One Night GoneAuthor: Tara Laskowski
Published by: Graydon House on Oct. 1, 2019
Genres: Mystery/Thriller
Pages: 352
Format: Paperback, ARC
Source: Harlequin Books
Book Rating: 8.5/10
It was the perfect place to disappear…
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…
Review:
Tight, mysterious, and pacey!
One Night Gone is an atmospheric, suspenseful thriller that takes us into the life of Allison Simpson, a depressed, heartbroken meteorologist who after moving to Opal Beach to house sit for the fall inadvertently gets drawn into a thirty-year-old missing persons case involving the young carnival teen, Maureen Haddaway who one day just vanished without a trace.
The prose is descriptive and intense. The characters are troubled, vulnerable, and tenacious. And the plot using a past/present, back-and-forth style unravels and intertwines into a compelling, cunning tale full of deception, manipulation, familial drama, swirling emotions, violence, mayhem, and murder.
Overall, One Night Gone is an eerie, sharp, ominous debut by Laskowski that highlights the selfish, scheming, desperate side of human nature and reminds us that skeletons often find their way to the surface no matter how well they are hidden or buried.
This novel is available now.
Pick up a copy from your favourite retailer or from one of the following links.
Thank you to Harlequin Books for providing me with a copy in exchange for an honest review.
About Tara Laskowski
TARA LASKOWSKI is the 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. Her debut novel One Night Gone will be published in October 2019 by Graydon House Books. 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 and her husband, writer Art Taylor, write the column Long Story Short at the Washington Independent Review of Books. She earned a BA in English with a minor in writing from Susquehanna University and an MFA in creative writing from George Mason University. She grew up in Pennsylvania and lives in Virginia.
