This time it’s a gone guy. That’s the propulsive premise behind R. J. Jacobs’ heart-pounding first mystery, And Then You Were Gone.
When 30-year-old child psychologist Emily Firestone reluctantly agrees to go on a weekend sailing trip with her microbiologist boyfriend, Paolo Ferarra, little could she have known that the romantic outing would turn her into an amateur detective. Everything seems to be going well—some fishing, some foreplay, some French bread, more than some chardonnay and red wine—until Emily wakes up the next morning, hungover, to find her Argentine lover missing. Emily is “unmoored and drifting” (literally and figuratively), and she can’t swim.
More than wine and the heady allure of passion have contributed to Emily’s blowsy condition. She mixed Ativan with the alcohol. The medication is just one of several methods she depends on to control symptoms of her bipolar II diagnosis, a disorder that defines her personality and is the driving force in her life and the entire plot of the novel. She suffers from anxiety, nausea, and panic attacks. She attempts to calm her fears by using techniques she suggests to patients, “structure the time, focus on other things, stay busy.”
And stay busy she does. There is a great deal of backstory in the novel that unravels as Emily attempts to find out what happened to Paolo. She seeks help from old friends—her former soccer teammate at Vanderbilt University, now a public affairs officer for Nashville Metro; and one of Paolo’s softball sidekicks. The reader learns of Paolo’s doctoral research to discover a vaccine for the H1-N24 virus, as well as his motley crew of office mates and lab partners: a controlling supervisor; a young, ambitious intern; a former coworker. Along with the usual academic politics, they battle for funds, compete to publish papers, and wrangle for trips to international conferences.
As Emily’s desperation quickly spirals, she is intent on proving Paolo is alive. Jacobs’ sympathetic understanding of Emily’s mental condition, how it contributes to her stress and mania, and how it shapes her determination and her survival, is well done. In the end, Paolo may be gone but he is not forgotten—or forgiven. And Then You Were Gone is a disturbing, fully satisfying drama.
