Just Finished Reading The Vanishing Year by Kate Moretti

The Vanishing Year, by Kate Moretti, is one of those books I read after choosing it almost at random from my public library's shelves.  It's a mystery on different levels: a young woman, Zoe Whittaker, has had a rough past, being abandoned by her mother soon after birth and brought up by her adoptive mother in poverty after the adoptive father was killed in an accident.  She went through a period a few years before when she consumed and peddled drugs, and got in trouble both with the law and with her suppliers, having testified against them.  Now, with a new identity provided by the authorities, she is affluent and married to a wealthy young Manhattan businessman, Henry Whittaker.  But Henry, alternately very affectionate and then cold and controlling, has his own secrets that he is keeping from Zoe.  Who was Zoe's birth mother, who was Tara, Henry's mysterious first wife who he said had died in a traffic accident?  And what about the two thugs she put in prison...have they discovered where she now is?  These and more questions keeping coming up in the story until the reader isn't quite sure what is real and who is who...

It's fun to read this kind of fiction.  The book isn't very long and not part of a long series, so the time investment isn't great.  I liked Zoe, a realistic character with her own admitted shortcomings...no superhero here, thankfully.  And I enjoyed all the unraveling mysteries, plot twists, and misdirection until it all gets clearly laid out in the final pages.  After finishing the book, I thought yes, that explains why Henry married Zoe and treated her in such a peculiar way.  It's apparent to me that Moretti had outlined her book from start to finish before starting on it...there's no way she could have just begun to write it and then let the story develop on its own.  Some authors, like Stephen King, don't believe in outlining their stories while others, like Isaac Asimov, were methodical about preparing in advance what they were going to write.  I can see the advantages of both approaches, but with King's method it's a bit harder to predict the ending.  In any event, The Vanishing Year...which came out just last year...was a good read, and I can see it successfully being adapted to the screen...