Review
On its surface, Gillian Flynn's
Gone Girl appears to be a run-of-the-mill mystery with a relatively standard plot: On the morning of his fifth wedding anniversary, Nick Dunne gets a call at work from a concerned neighbor: his front door is wide open. Nick rushes home to find a tea kettle boiled to nothing on the stove, furniture overturned in his living room and his wife Amy missing. He of course calls the police, who immediately begin investigating the disappearance as a crime. The novel follows the course of the investigation as more and more evidence leads them to believe Nick has murdered his wife. This somewhat average synopsis, however, belies the book's uniquely complex story and the deliciously evil plot twists that elevate it from common pot-boiler to "oh my gosh you must read this
now" status.
The story is...
Beyond the Book
According to the FBI's National Crime Information Center, 678,860 people were reported missing in 2011. The suspected cause of a disappearance was only recorded in about half of all cases. Of these, 3% were adults; 96% were juvenile runaways, about 1% were abducted by a non-custodial parent, and 0.1% abducted by a stranger. It should be noted that the police are required to alert the NCIC of any person under 21 who is missing, thus the NCIC stats should be a fairly accurate count of missing juveniles, but likely underestimate the number of adults who went missing, as those who were located within a short period of time were probably not reported to the NCIC.
The vast majority of missing person cases are cleared each year. In fact, in 2011 the NCIC actually cleared more cases...
