So many questions without answers can wear a person down, can leave a hole, and can prevent a person from fully moving on with one's life. Just by reading the synopsis of this, and your review, I feel like I can guess the ending, and what the ‘ick’ factor is. After 10 years have passed, the family finally gets some answers--what they don’t realize is how close they were to knowing the truth all along.

A golden girl, favorite daughter with a brilliant future ahead of her: Ellie tells her mother save the last piece of lasagna for her and she is going to the library but it will not take long for her to come back.Most of her plots are traditional tales that have been told before in some form, but the difference is that she knows how to take something that could be predictable and put her own spin on it. The book alternates between the present day life of Laurel (whose entire life was destroyed as a consequence of her daughter’s kidnapping) and the circumstances of Ellie’s kidnapping. Poppy’s self-assuredness, while impressive at first, strikes Laurel as strange and wrong, as if Floyd coached her on what to say and do.

The original book is also highly readable at the start but as the story progresses, the narration becomes a bit contrived and the flow gets stuck. I received a ARC of this novel from the publisher through Edelweiss, thank you, will post to public media upon publication. Laurel is immediately taken with Floyd's youngest daughter, Poppy, who is beautiful and wise beyond her years, truly an old soul.I don’t want to say more because part of the excitement of the book is discovering how the various plot lines intertwine and how the mysteries are resolved. Ten years later, her mother finds new love (divorced her ex-husband though they still remain friends) and slowly learns of connections to her missing child who was feared dead. The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. So when she meets an unexpectedly charming man in a café, no one is more surprised than Laurel at how quickly their flirtation develops into something deeper.

To say I'm waiting with bated breath for Lisa's next novel would be an understatement, and I hope you enjoy this story as much as I did. It sort of feels like I've read a hundred different variations of the missing daughter/grieving mother plot, and Then She Was Gone doesn't really do anything new with it.A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. While I certainly would have loved a little more surprise, I still thought this was a captivating and compelling read, and if you like thrillers, you may very well enjoy this one. I think this is one of those books that I had such high hopes for that I let myself expect too much. If the author can find just the right combination of these things, then I will be right there ready to throw more stars their way.