Watch Me Disappear/ Janelle Brown / 358 pgs

This is a suspense novel about a family of three. Mother Billie is a free spirit, do-her-own-thing kind of woman. Father Jonathan is a workaholic who loves his wife and daughter but has become somewhat disconnected over the years. Daughter Olive is 15 and finding her way. The story opens with a day at the beach, one of the last happy days for this family. Then we fast forward a year and realize that Billie died not long after that day, while hiking in the mountains on her own. Because Billie's body was never found, she has not been declared dead yet. Olive begins to wonder if her mother might be alive when she starts having visions of her mother talking to her. Soon Jonathan is pulled into this theory, reluctantly, and the two travel down a path of discovering what happened to Billie and who she really was. I have to admit I did not like this one. It was slow to get going and even once it did, I found Jonathan and his lack of common sense and poor decision-making to be annoying. In addition, each and every revelation in the book is a cliche. There's the wife's best friend, the shadowy figure from Billie's past, was she or wasn't having an affair. Even the ending was telegraphed about halfway through the story. There was nothing new or different here and I didn't feel like Jonathon earned his happy ending, but he got it anyway. To top it off, the last chapter goes back to the day Billie disappeared and she reiterates everything her husband and daughter just learned about her over the course of the book. I would rather have just read that chapter and not the whole book:(