Picture this: you’re sitting at home, taking care of your infant grandchild while your daughter and her boyfriend go out on a date. They’re young, they deserve a break from the struggles of young parenthood, so they go.

And then they never come back.

What do you do? How do you react? Where do you even go from there?

In Lisa Jewell’s The Night She Disappeared, this dilemma is explored through the perspective of a mother desperate to find her daughter again. At the same time, there’s a new couple moving into town, with one half of that equation becoming extremely interested in finding out what happened to that missing couple, as well.

In a few short words, this book is thrilling, heart-wrenching, but most of all, it’s gripping. As these characters start digging into the truth, they come to realizations and conclusions that shock their entire world. Perceptions are flipped. Lives are changed. And at the core of it all, a young baby has lost his parents.

*Spoilers Ahead*

The book focuses on the disappearance of Tallulah Murray and her boyfriend, Zach Allister. They go out on a date one night while Tallulah’s mother, Kim, takes care of their baby boy, Noah. The dread that begins to build from the first chapter onward is immense; you know what happens, they disappear, but to know that they’re leaving behind a young baby is even more gut-wrenching.

Kim does her best to look for answers, but unfortunately, the police don’t have any definitive clues. At least, not in the beginning.

Meanwhile, a new headmaster to the local school, Shaun, moves in with his girlfriend Sophie, who is a mystery novelist. His girlfriend finds a clue on their property that links back to Zach and Tallulah’s disappearance: an engagement ring, which means Zach intended to propose to Tallulah. However, who left that clue there for the novelist to find? And why?

This basically kicks off Sophie’s involvement in the case, enabling her to reach out to Kim and help the grieving mother find the truth behind what happened to Tallulah and Zach.

The novel cuts between the past and present, and a lot of the answers lie in the past. 

Tallulah, as it turns out, befriended another girl called Scarlett. At first, it started off as a typical friendship, but it becomes clear that Tallulah and Scarlett are interested in each other romantically. This is set up pretty clearly near the beginning of their relationship: the physical touching, the lingering gazes, the sudden way in which they became so close to one another.

It’s a difficult relationship for Tallulah to balance, though. She befriends Scarlett and begins developing feelings for her all while still having a precarious relationship with Zach, the father of her son.

Zach works hard to provide for Tallulah and Noah, saving up all his money to buy a house at his young age of 19. There were parts where I could really pity Zach. I mean, the kid was putting his all in trying to make his relationship work with Tallulah, but she was falling in love with someone else.

But I don’t want to paint Tallulah as a villain here because she’s not. She’s young, she’s clearly exploring her identity and her perception of romance, and she unfortunately becomes enamored by Scarlett. It’s also shown that Zach was acting abusive towards Tallulah at times, nothing graphic but enough to make anyone uncomfortable. So it’s not surprise that Tallulah preferred Scarlett over him in the end.

Scarlett is portrayed as a very nuanced, complex character that, ultimately, I found to be distasteful. She’s promiscuous, she’s a cheater, and she just doesn’t know how to love someone properly. She’s a victim of her circumstances, without a doubt: she comes from a rich family with parents who don’t love each other nor do they care about her. So it comes as no surprise that her idea of love and being in love is so messed up.

Scarlett, while developing her relationship with Tallulah, also strings along a boy named Liam, who is very in love with her. He would do anything for her. In fact, Scarlett has a whole group of friends who seem devoted to her. She’s their group leader and would do anything to protect her.

Tallulah, as a result, becomes incredibly conflicted with her circumstances as the book goes on. She loves Scarlett, but Zach wants to form a family with her. And she knows that Zach will react poorly to her being in love with another girl. For Noah’s sake, she tries to placate Zach, but that can only last for so long.

What really angers me is how Scarlett was basically using the people around her as she pleased, and without consequence. She said she ‘loved’ Tallulah, but had no issues cheating on her with Liam when the opportunity arose.

Not only that, but it’s revealed that Scarlett was sleeping with the former headmaster’s husband, a man double her age. 

Tallulah becomes aware that Zach is going to propose to her, so she speaks with Scarlett about this. Scarlett wants to stop this, so she devises a plan to interrupt the proposal on the night it happens.

The night of the proposal is the same night Tallulah and Zach disappear. 

As the novel goes on, you start to have an idea of what happened to these two. More specifically, I had an inkling that they were going to get rid of Zach above everything else. And I was right!

On the night Zach and Tallulah go out on their fateful date, they head to a bar where Scarlett and her friends are at. Scarlett’s plan to interrupt the proposal sort of works; originally, she wanted to tell Zach that she and Tallulah were in love, but it escalated. Scarlett invites Zach, Tallulah, and the rest of her friends back to her house for a pool party. And because they’re young and drunk and also on drugs, they all agree.

At the pool party, Zach and Tallulah get into a fight where it’s revealed that Tallulah is in love with Scarlett and that she doesn’t want to marry Zach. He flings the engagement ring box at her and threatens to take Noah away from her for good, which is when Scarlett bashes him over the head, killing him.

Following that is an elaborate plan by Scarlett, her mother, and her brother to hide Tallulah while the investigation into Zach and Tallulah’s disappearance is underway. Tallulah gets drugged and taken aboard a yacht in the middle of the ocean with Scarlett and her family. This is where she is kept while her mother and son continue on with their lives back in England, wondering where Tallulah and Zach are.

God, my heart just broke for Kim and Noah the most. Seriously. As a mother, to lose your child must be the worst thing in the world. And they left a baby behind. I was tearing up during some of these parts, I can’t lie.

Thankfully, Sophie the mystery novelist figures out that one of the girls who was there on the night of the pool party, so one of Scarlett’s friends, Mimi, sort of saw what happened and knew Scarlett did something wrong. But due to that aforementioned devotion and loyalty she felt for Scarlett, she kept it a secret, but she took the engagement ring box before she left.

Mimi enlists the help of her friend, Lexie, who had left before the mess happened. 

Lexie is a travel blogger who knows about Shaun and Sophie’s incoming arrival to their town. Her mother is a prominent figure in their school community, so this is most likely how she learned about them. Lexie reads Sophie’s mystery novel, sees how the heroine uncovers one of the clues, and basically plants the engagement ring that Mimi swiped from the crime scene in Shaun and Sophie’s garden for Sophie to find.

This is what opens the can of worms that leads to them finding Zach’s corpse, hidden underneath Scarlett’s family’s mansion in a secret tunnel that nobody knew the existence of prior to this whole debacle. But Tallulah is still nowhere to be found, at that point.

Using the power of social media, Kim and Sophie piece together that Scarlett is on a yacht with her family out on the Atlantic. With the police involved, the police start a raid on the yacht, arresting Scarlett, her mother, and her brother. At the same time, they save Tallulah, who at this point is highly dependent on opioids due to Scarlett’s mother drugging her the whole time she is on the yacht.

And the novel ends with Tallulah returning to Kim, Noah, and her family at long last.

What an ending! What a book!

The writing is spectacular. I mean, you can really feel for Tallulah and Kim. I really couldn’t stand Scarlett due to her selfish actions and how she derailed Tallulah and Zach’s lives completely. 

What’s really satisfying is that Liam actually played a role in Scarlett’s take-down. Liam had killed the former headmaster’s husband when he tried to assault Scarlett. That same day, he had sex with Scarlett, but then Tallulah came to the house and Scarlett all but kicked him out.

This made Liam realize who Scarlett truly is. Liam has access to a strange tool that could open the secret tunnel where the former headmaster’s body, and later Zach’s body, are kept to decompose. When Scarlett contacts him frantically, telling him to dispose of the tool, Liam decides not to.

This secret tool is later found in a similar way to how the engagement ring was found. And this is interesting because, throughout the book, you get the illusion that Liam is truly innocent in everything and he knows nothing. It made sense, since he left the pool party early after all and didn’t see the murder happen. But this little detail of Liam getting some revenge on Scarlett for wronging him and playing him as a fool is extremely satisfying.

I feel so bad for Tallulah, above all else. She’s in a really bad spot in life, but she’s just trying to make the best of it. Due to Scarlett’s selfishness, she was separated from her son for a year and a half.

All in all, I was deeply touched by this book as it goes to show the lengths of a mother’s love; Kim never stopped looking for Tallulah. The book also explores themes of romance, identity, and warped perceptions of love. As much as Scarlett said she loved Tallulah, she never really loved anyone besides herself.

And in the end, she paid the ultimate price.

I give this book five stars!

Happy reading!