Just Jennifer

 

Long Gone by Alafair Burke (Harper, July 2011)

What would you do if you walked into work one day and found everything gone and your boss dead on the floor? What if you then find yourself the suspect in this man’s death and then realize you have been part of a bigger scam, something that makes you question everything you’ve ever known in your life.  This is what happens to Alice Humphrey, daughter of Oscar winning movie director Frank Humphrey.  After Alice was laid of from her job at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she spent many long months trying to find a new job.  When she meets Drew Campbell at a gallery opening and he offers her the chance to manage a gallery, essentially as her own, she thinks the offer is too good to be true, but decides she has nothing to lose.  Nothing but her entire life, she quickly learns.  After the first show is on the walls, the gallery becomes the focus of a zealous church leader who accuses the gallery of peddling child porn.  The next day when Alice shows up at work, the gallery has been stripped clean of everything, Drew is dead on the floor and all evidence points to Alice.  She is thrust into a vortex of lies and misperceptions as she learns that the gallery was set up as if she were the owner that a character named Drew Campbell has been created, but it looks like, and uses all of Alice’s personal information.  Not sure where to turn or who to trust, Alice begins to unravel a web of deceit and follows a trail that leads further back in her life than she could ever imagine.  Long Gone is full of suspense and Alafair Burke slowly builds the tension as Alice searches for the truth.  The plotting is very clever and there are “what-if’s” that cannot be imagined. This stand-alone is a compulsive must read.

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