Do you ever wonder how authors can embed themselves into the minds of characters, characters who are purely evil or mentally deranged. Where do those horrific thoughts come from? I suppose it's better to write them down than manifest them in reality.

Gone Girl is written from binary first person points of view - alternating between Amy Elliott Dunne and her husband, Nick Dunne. The book starts out slowly, to the point where I almost abandoned it. Too many books too little time. But it builds and this book was listed as one of the top mysteries of the past decade AND it was made into a movie starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike so something has to happen, and it does.

Amy is amazing and she says so. She is a shape shifter who plans and schemes those future shifts well in advance so that she can punish those who offend her. She forecasts not only her own actions but how those effected will react to those actions. The writer, Gillian Flynn, is manipulating her characters and her readers and how the reader will react to Amy and the rest of the characters in the book because that’s what writers try to do.

In her diary at the beginning of the book, Amy seems to be sweetness and light. She was brought up as a star in her parents' children's book series. Everyone loves her and is devastated when she disappears. But she has set up her disappearance to point the finger at Nick as the perpetrator who has been abusing her and cheating on her.

The author does paint the story into a corner. Wonderful openings can sometimes lead to an unsolvable situation, when the options for solutions are limited. The one that Flynn chooses is possible but not the best. The resolution seemed forced and not the way the story itself wanted to play out. There are details of money and timing that bother me, and I think that Nick, the husband, although seriously badly treated could have done better and doesn't come out of this story well.

This is one of those stories that I felt the reader and the story itself was not treated kindly.