Long Gone

I ordered Long Gone because the reviews were good and I love a mystery. It sounded intriquing -- the idea that a young woman could be duped into running an art gallery that was a front and then be accused of the murder of the man she worked for. Sounded great.
The problem is that it is a mystery novel entirely without suspense, with shallow characters that it's hard to care about and a plot so predictable that it left me shaking my head in wonder that it was ever published in the first place (or why I finished reading it).
And suffice it to say that it seems to follow Mystery 101 with the revelation of the actual villain in the end. I think I might have made a rude sound when the murderer was revealed -- illogical, out of left field and not believable.
It was dull, lacked suspense and I never cared about a single character.
Put this writier up against the likes of Elizabeth George and she simply disappears!
Sigh.

I wanted to write more, but this is a very forgetful book and much is already forgotten. There are better books to buy.

Alafair Burke just won a place in the club of the 20 best authors of thrillers in the USA. Plus, you will remember this book.It has substance, it made me think of Stendhal, the French romantic author of The Red and the Black, because the story comes out of the soul of the participants, not from the mechanics of the drama. Two main stories alternate in the book: on one hand, a teenager disappears; on the other Alice the self-doubting heiress of some rich mogul gets a new job and falls in a trap. She has been chosen to manage an art gallery, only to discover the body of her employer and all kinds of evidence mounting against her. She thinks somebody frames her, her father thinks it is all against him. We expect that the two stories will mesh, but when they do, it is not the way we thought it would. The motives here are complex, so the solution is too. But it all makes good sense: the psychology of each character is excellent.
On the audio: if you ever tried to read for a blind friend, you know how hard it is to maintain liveliness and interest in your voice: we can all do that for the first two pages, but then it becomes harder to focus, and this is a ten hours book. This reading by Tamara Marston is so good, you would listen to ANY story she reads. She has a contralto voice that allows her to do convincing impersonations of male-female dialogs. I certainly enjoyed the audio.

Not a good story or good writing