Cultural Dessert

‘How to Disappear’ by Gillian McAllister

6 January 2023

I really enjoyed Gillian McAllister’s quirky time-travelling crime thriller ‘Wrong Place Wrong Time’ (reviewed here in July 2022) so I was keen to read something else by her. ‘How to Disappear’, published in 2020, is a more conventional thriller which tells the story of a family entering witness protection. Told through a series of very short chapters, each alternating between the points of view of the main family members, it completely gripped me. It’s a believable contemporary tale which emphasises the difficulties of adopting a completely new identity, and avoiding contact with people from your previous life, in the age of social media. Gillian McAllister makes the novel pacy and incredibly scary: it’s the most tense I have felt while reading a book for years, but I couldn’t put it down.

Labels: Books

posted by Robin Simpson @ 3:30 pm