Note: Thank you to NetGalley, Storm Publishing, and author Nichole Severn for the advanced reader copy of this book. This review will also be posted on NetGalley. What follows is my unbiased review of the book.

The Vanishing Wife was a book I burned through in about 24 hours. It sucked me in right away and I couldn’t wait to see how it ended. When I started thinking about the review, however, I could see the flaws I missed in my desire to learn the truth. Is that good or bad? I can’t say. It’s a book I thoroughly enjoyed, but when I started reflecting on it, there were a number of things that started bothering me.

This is the second book in author Nichole Severn’s Leigh Brody FBI series. I haven’t read the first. I don’t think you need to. It sounds like the first case dealt with a case that encompassed Leigh’s family history, and the ramifications of that are felt in The Vanishing Wife. The author writes enough about it here that I didn’t feel lost.

Leight Brody is on medical leave when she receives a cryptic text from her best friend, who is on vacation in Gulf Shores, Alabama with her husband and daughter. Elyse says she needs Leigh’s help and begs her to come to Gulf Shores. When Leigh shows up at their vacation home there, she finds out that Elyse is missing after having been assaulted several days before.

Elyse is a recent friend for Leigh, but the only one she has. Although she doesn’t have any authority there, Leigh begins digging into the case. The local detective, Henrietta Moore, is focused on the case of a missing teenage girl and not on Elyse’s disappearance. She’s not happy to have Leigh digging into the case, and even less so when Leigh starts uncovering problems with the investigation.

The Vanishing Wife was gripping with a lot of twists and turns. The more information that is revealed, both about Elyse and her family as well as the Gulf Shores community, the more possibilities there are for what actually happened to Elyse. The Narrative jumps back and forth between Leigh’s point of view after she arrives there and Elyse’s point of view leading up to her disappearance. This keeps the read very suspenseful. I didn’t know what happened with Elyse other than that she was attacked while running on the beach. Of course, there was much more, but even Elyse couldn’t remember at first due to the concussion she suffered. This had the effect of feeling like the reader was remembering things along with Elyse in her narrative. It was very well done.

As I said, there are a number of problems that I didn’t pick up on while I was reading the book. I don’t think they take away from the story, but for some people, it might. Early on, it’s pretty obvious Detective Moore is in over her head. She misses key clues and doesn’t document important parts of her investigation. Who does she answer to? The reason for this is also a bit suspect in a small community. In general, the year-round residents of Gulf Shores would know a lot more about each other. At some point, someone should have pulled her off the case, but apparently there’s no one to do that.

I have a close friend who work for the FBI, so maybe I catch things others don’t, but there’s no way Leigh would be able to act the way she does. Granted, it’s the only friend she has that is in trouble, but all the more reason her boss would likely send in local agents once she saw Leigh was investigating outside of her parameters while on leave. Both Leigh and Henrietta seem to be able to do what they want with little supervision. It makes a good story, but it requires a good suspending of disbelief.

There’s also a lot of focus on the fact that Leigh is recently out of surgery, having had a complete hysterectomy following the discovery of cancer. I can’t count how many times her sutures straining were talked about. That shouldn’t be happening this far out in her recovery. I have had a number of surgeries and usually the outer sutures were taken out after no more than 2 weeks. The only time I had issues similar to what is depicted with Leigh were after my disastrous appendectomy and the complications, and even then the outer sutures and staples had been taken out about 2 weeks after the surgery. The way Leigh complained sounded more like a woman who was in her first week out of surgery than several.

Parts of the conclusion also felt contrived and didn’t flow as well with the rest of the book. I can’t go into details without giving away spoilers, but there’s a twist to the story the reader is drawn into, and it doesn’t feel genuine. It’s almost like the author got to that point and couldn’t write the ending she wanted.

However, I did thoroughly enjoy The Vanishing Wife. It requires a good suspension of disbelief but it’s well-written and well-paced. The characters are interesting. I don’t regret reading it, and it was a good story. The problems with it really didn’t take away from the story all that much as long as you can suspend your disbelief a bit.