Gone (Glenna Thomson, Bantam)

On the final day of school in 1984, Rebecca Bundy is last seen by her sister, Eliza, waiting for the bus after an argument with their mother. With the disappearance dismissed as a runaway case, a murder-suicide at a nearby home instead captures the attention of police and media mere days later. Eventually, the police conduct a half-hearted investigation that pigeonholes Rebecca, aged 17, as vulnerable because of her supposed sexual appeal to the men in her periphery. As is made clear from Eliza’s reflections in the prologue, it takes 38 years from Rebecca’s disappearance—into the current age of podcasts, armchair sleuths and a cultural fascination with true crime—for Rebecca’s fate to finally be uncovered. Gone is the first rural crime novel by Glenna Thomson, author of two contemporary fiction novels exploring women’s experiences. The fictional town of Maryhill in central Victoria and its small-town conflicts are depicted as evocatively as Jane Harper’s Kiewarra. Unlike most rural crime novels, Gone is not centred around the investigation. The story is Eliza’s rather than Rebecca’s, as Rebecca is gone before she can tell her own story. Thomson writes with empathy about the traumatic effect of living in the shadow of a missing person and the need for answers. Recommended for readers of Emily Maguire’s An Isolated Incident, this is an insightful and thoughtful novel that touches on the ethics of true crime media and returns the focus to the people involved.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Dr Ilona Urquhart is a children’s and youth services librarian on the Bellarine Peninsula and is a 2024-2025 CBCA Book of the Year Award Judge for the Younger Readers Category. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

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