A review by erasmios
Elizabeth Is Missing by Emma Healey

3.0

Maud's best friend Elizabeth is missing. Healey's first novel is a well-written little mystery about an elderly lady's missing friend. Maud starts to "investigate" her friend's disappearance, but she has one big problem. She's suffering from severe dementia. Aided by the pieces of her memories and small dateless notes in her pocket and purse she tries her best to find Elizabeth. The novel was very captivating. Maud's inner struggles with her dementia are written very convincingly. To others, she seems like a "mad old woman" but the reader knows how her past gets mixed with the present and how her demented logic works. She's not mad, just confused, living in two worlds at once. And Elizabeth's not the only person to go missing; Maud's sister also disappeared 70 years earlier. From the beginning, I was reading Elizabeth Is Missing as a crime novel, and that lead me to be a little underwhelmed by the ending. There were no big surprises. Don't expect Christie-like twists here. It's not that kind of story.