Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Speaking of cracked out, this book is more twisted than your nanna’s back. The chick-lit thriller of the moment, it’s a page-turner that I couldn’t put down (from an unofficial office straw poll of five workmates, they all smashed through it in the same way). It’s tight and more taut than Joan Rivers (alright I’ll stop with the bad analogies now). I can’t write much without giving the game away, but we start off by reading diary entries of the perfect Amy, about to celebrate her five-year anniversary with husband Nick. But the anniversary doesn’t happen when Amy inexplicably goes missing and the investigation turns to Nick. He then gets a turn at narrating, where we hear about his retrenchment from his dream magazine writing gig in New York, and he and Amy’s disappointment at having to move to his pokey home town in Missouri. Kernels of information are laid down by husband and wife, like a Hansel and Gretel trail of breadcrumbs leading to the truth. Of course there’s a humdinger of a plot twist which I won’t give away. It didn’t surprise me to read that it’s been earmarked for a movie adaptation, or that it flew off the shelves when it was released in mid-2012 (2 million copies and counting). It may not be literature but it shows that a good story is worth its weight in gold.