On the morning of their fifth wedding anniversary, Amy Dunne disappears from the Missouri house she shares with her husband, Nick. There are signs of a struggle in the living room, and as the hours pass with no word, the police and a ravenous national media begin to circle. Nick, evasive and strangely composed under the cameras, quickly becomes the prime suspect in his wife's disappearance.
Gillian Flynn tells the story in two alternating voices. Nick narrates the investigation from the present as suspicion tightens around him, while Amy's diary traces the couple's courtship and the slow souring of their marriage. The two accounts refuse to line up, and the widening gap between them keeps the reader guessing about who is lying, who is telling the truth, and what really happened on the anniversary.
Beneath the missing-person case, Gone Girl is a caustic anatomy of a modern marriage and the performances it demands. Flynn dissects the roles spouses play for each other and for the outside world, the machinery of a media spectacle, and the resentments that accumulate when two clever, image-conscious people stop being honest with each other. Sharp, cynical, and ruthlessly plotted around a pair of unreliable narrators, it became one of the defining psychological thrillers of its era.