The Moment She Was Gone : A Novel - Hardcover

It's an axiom of fiction as well as real life that a phone that rings in the middle of the night rarely portends good tidings. For Andy Gulliver, the protagonist of Evan Hunter's gripping new novel, it usually means that his peripatetic twin sister, Annie, is gone again, along with her tenuous hold on reality. Annie has been disappearing with no warning and reappearing just as unexpectedly ever since her adolescence, when she ran off to Sweden to find her first love, a boy she met on an earlier trip abroad with her family. However, the real, if unconscious, object of her search, as Hunter makes clear, is the father who abandoned the Gullivers years before. Annie's occasional postcards and letters from places as far-flung as Nepal and New Guinea offer just enough reassurance to enable Andy and their mother to maintain the illusion that there's nothing really wrong with her. Annie's increasing mental deterioration, like her family's implacable denial, is brilliantly depicted, and drives the narrative to its heavily foreshadowed but still shocking conclusion. Hunter, a master of suspense, is the author of 20 novels as well as countless police procedurals and detective stories, all of which are marked by the psychological acuity that suffuses this, his latest. --Jane Adams

Evan Hunter was born in New York City in 1926. He was widely recognised as one of America's most popular novelists, as well as a successful writer for television and cinema whose credits include the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. As Ed McBain, Evan became one of the most illustrious names in crime fiction. He was a holder of the Mystery Writers of America's coveted Grand Master Award. Evan died in June 2005 at the age of 79.