Since She Went Away

Jenna Barton and her best friend Celia had arranged to meet at a park at midnight. Jenna was held up at home and arrived fifteen minutes late; Celia was gone. All that was left was a single diamond earring, and the national press christened the missing woman The Diamond Mom. Jenna has spent every day since blaming herself.

While she is still living under that guilt and the media attention that comes with it, her fifteen-year-old son Jared falls hard for Tabitha, a new girl in town with no past she is willing to talk about. Then Tabitha disappears too, and Jared is left wrecked and half-believed.

David Bell's 2016 novel is a domestic thriller about the long tail of an unsolved case: the amateur sleuths and true-crime obsessives it attracts, the strain it puts on a family, and the small lies that hold up a life until they don't. Jenna's attempt to make sense of Tabitha's vanishing forces her back through Celia's, and the buried truth turns out to be much closer to home than she can bear.