He’s Gone

by Deb Caletti

Contemporary Fiction/Mystery

Book Description

“What do you think happened to your husband, Mrs. Keller?” 

The Sunday morning starts like any other, aside from the slight hangover. Dani Keller wakes up on her Seattle houseboat, a headache building behind her eyes from the wine she drank at a party the night before. But on this particular Sunday morning, she’s surprised to see that her husband, Ian, is not home. As the hours pass, Dani fills her day with small things. But still, Ian does not return. Irritation shifts to worry, worry slides almost imperceptibly into panic. And then, like a relentless blackness, the terrible realization hits Dani: He’s gone.

As the police work methodically through all the logical explanations—he’s hurt, he’s run off, he’s been killed—Dani searches frantically for a clue as to whether Ian is in fact dead or alive. And, slowly, she unpacks their relationship, holding each moment up to the light: from its intense, adulterous beginning, to the grandeur of their new love, to the difficulties of forever. She examines all the sins she can—and cannot—remember. As the days pass, Dani will plumb the depths of her conscience, turning over and revealing the darkest of her secrets in order to discover the hard truth—about herself, her husband, and their lives together.

MY THOUGHTS: 3 OUT OF 5 FLEURS DE LIS

He’s Gone by Deb Caletti

Dani Keller wakes up one Sunday morning to find her husband Ian inexplicably has vanished. With virtually no clues to go on and a foggy memory of the night before, Dani does everything she can to search for Ian, and help the police. The expanded family of both Ian and Dani complicate things though–and since Dani and Ian were each other’s second spouses, bad blood was definitely there. Dani recalls her and Ian’s past, and as her stressed mind turns on her, begins to wonder if what she thought was happiness was really that after all.

The idea of this book was intriguing, but it kind of fell apart in reality. This novel contained a whole lot of exposition and telling, with hardly any doing.

The story of Dani and Ian’s pasts are told in flashbacks in between the hectic search for Ian in the present. Dani is the narrator of the story and thus we get to know her, but much more developed was Ian’s character. Dani left an abusive marriage and cheated on her first husband with Ian, and she thought she’d found her soulmate, until she shamefully came to the realization that you can never can really know someone you’re in a relationship with. Needless to say, Dani and Ian both have a lot of baggage, and no matter how much you may need and want you, you never really can start over.

The book didn’t really have a lot of twists and turns, just a couple of clues sprinkled here and there that Dani finds and follows up on. It’s interesting to watch her do this as sleepless nights and worry begin to take a tool on her body and mind and her thoughts become more and more erratic.

The end was very, very sudden and I wish, for all the waiting I did for it, it could have been something more explosive. But real life isn’t like that…your life is lived in the quiet, mundane moments.

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About the Author

Deb Caletti is an award-winning author and a National Book Award finalist whose books—Honey, Baby, Sweetheart; The Queen of Everything; The Secret Life of Prince Charming—are published and translated worldwide. She lives with her family in Seattle.

For more about Deb Caletti and her work, “Like” her on Facebook, follow her on Twitter, or visit her website at debcaletti.com.

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