The Night She Disappeared is the latest mystery from popular and internationally bestselling author LISA JEWELL. In typical Jewell fashion, it merges together buried secrets with a tightly wound mystery, centred around a missing teenage girl.

HEATHER LEWIS writes.

Even bestselling authors with over 20 years of writing under their belt get stumped when the world gets turned upside down. The Night She Disappeared, the 19th book by renowned UK writer Lisa Jewell, almost didn’t happen for this reason. Like everyone in the world, when the pandemic happened, Lisa found herself unable to work.

‘I definitely had issues with this book I’ve not had with other books,’ Lisa tells me. ‘I started writing it before the pandemic hit, but then after it hit I actually got COVID-19 and ended up in bed for a week. By the time I was out of bed, the world had come to a standstill.’

As Lisa tried to go back to her draft, its picturesque village setting might as well have been on the moon. Characters shake hands with strangers, get drunk in pubs and have house parties – a far cry from the mask-and hand-sanitiser-filled lockdown we found ourselves in.

‘It just felt like another world. I got it into my head that I would never be able to write another book again.’

Eventually the gears started turning again and Lisa was able to finish The Night She Disappeared. You wouldn’t guess its creation was so pained, because it’s the same kind of page-turning mystery you’d expect from the author of The Family Upstairs or The Invisible Girl.

It’s 2017 in the fictional village nestled in the Surrey Hills region of the UK. Teenage mother Tallulah is heading out on a date with her on-again-off-again boyfriend Zach, who is also the father of her son. She leaves her baby with her mother, Kim, who is grateful to give her daughter a night off. Waking up the next morning, Kim discovers that neither Tallulah nor Zach have returned home. Tallulah’s friends say she was last seen heading to a house party at a woodside mansion nearby, referred to as ‘Dark Place’ and owned by the family of Scarlett, a popular yet damaged college student.

A year later, cosy crime writer Sophie has moved to the village with her boyfriend, who has just started as a head teacher at the boarding school nearby. While checking out the woods behind her new property, she finds a disturbing yet familiar sight – a sign nailed to a fence that reads ‘DIG HERE’. What Sophie finds there unearths a year-old cold case, fractured relationships and plenty of hidden secrets. ‘I don’t plan,’ Lisa tells me. ‘My books never end up as the thing I thought I was going to write when I sat down to write them.’

The Night She Disappeared originally began as a boarding school mystery, with a new head teacher who, on his first day, finds a body buried on school grounds.

‘I wanted to write about privilege, and I thought the bones would belong to an outsider, someone who didn’t belong in the privileged world that the children at the boarding school lived in.’

However, Lisa soon began to shift focus, moving away from the boarding school and instead focusing on the surrounding village and the secrets found within. The protagonist changed from the head-teacher to his novelist girlfriend, and the boarding school to a prestigious college. Moving away from the boarding school broadened the palette of characters Lisa could draw upon. In a fashion the author is well known for, the plot of The Night She Disappeared unfolds through multiple timelines and multiple perspectives that weave in and out of each other, eventually tying together in a satisfying climax. How does Lisa manage to keep so many threads together, while never planning anything in advance?

‘I suppose I’m just very aware of what I’ve written,’ she says. ‘I find it much easier to write a mystery jumping from people and timelines. If I was just looking at one person’s perspective, I wouldn’t know what was going on. It might look complicated to the reader, but for me it’s the simplest way of breaking it down and working out what’s going on.’

Charged with solving the mystery is cosy-crime novelist Sophie, who finds her writing somewhat coming to life as she stumbles upon a crime that’s not as clean and tidy as those she writes about. Lisa tells me that Sophie’s character and role in the story was another pleasant discovery as a result of not planning ahead.

‘I got towards the end of the book and it really occurred to me that Sophie wasn’t doing much. I made her just a generic novelist so she had a reason to move to the countryside with her boyfriend, Shaun, still be able to make money, and have a lot of time on her hands. Eventually I had this light-bulb moment of making Sophie a crime novelist herself and tying her own books into how the investigation unravels. It gave her a deeper and much more satisfying role in the book.’

Another trope of Lisa’s that emerges in The Night She Disappeared is realistically flawed young characters, caught between the malaise of adolescence and the harsh realities of the adult world. Unlike many writers crafting teenage characters, Lisa manages to have them appear human rather than caricatures.

‘When I’m writing teenage characters, I’m very much “less is more”. I like to suggest a teenager without slapping the reader about the face. I approach all my characters as just, “this is a human being”. People also often ask me about writing male characters, and I just say, “I don’t write male characters, I just write characters.”’

At the core of the young characters is Scarlett, a privileged art student with a gaggle of friends that cater to her every whim. She meets Tallulah at a college party and the pair quickly become infatuated. As the novel goes on, whether Scarlett’s feelings for Tallulah are genuine or just another manipulation tactic becomes murkier, especially as Scarlett and her friends appear to know more about Tallulah’s disappearance than they let on.

‘It wasn’t until the end of the book I realised I’d been subconsciously channelling my eldest daughter’s schoolfriend,’ Lisa says. ‘She physically resembles Scarlett – tall, slim, arresting looking without being classically beautiful. I’d heard all about this girl, about how she was so popular and how everyone wanted to be around her even though she was difficult and edgy and awkward and never made any effort. Then one day I actually saw her and I thought, “Why is this the girl everyone’s talking about?” That’s what I had in the back of my head while I was writing Scarlett.’

A lot of themes permeate The Night She Disappeared – the bond between mother and child, family trauma, the way people you think you trust can change, and the effects of manipulation and obsession. Yet there’s not a singular idea that Lisa wants readers to take away from her novel. Ultimately, she just wants them to enjoy the ride.

‘I never think like that while I’m writing,’ she says. ‘People are looking for and take away different things from books. If I sat down and thought “This is how I want people to feel” then it might limit all the things I could be doing inside that book. If I’m going to picture what’s going through my readers’ heads when they’ve finished it, I just want it to be, “Thank God, that was bloody brilliant!”’