"I have been alone for the past year, trapped on my bed in my room, listening to you. I have accomplished nothing, apart from memorizing your every word." As far as obsessive fans go, there are worse than 33-year-old Sera Fleece, who narrates Eliza Jane Brazier's seductively disquieting debut, If I Disappear, as though she's speaking directly to the object of her infatuation.
Sera is sure that something has happened to Rachel Bard--something along the lines of what's befallen the missing women Rachel has discussed on her true-crime podcast, Murder, She Spoke. What's more, Sera is certain that Rachel saw it coming. Sera knows from Rachel's podcasts that she broadcasts from a house at Fountain Creek Guest Ranch, run by her parents, in Northern California. Sera drives the three hours from her apartment to the property, where she meets Rachel's mother, Addy, under the pretense that she's looking for work. Of course, Sera remembers exactly what Rachel said about Addy in Episode 66: "She believes every fact is a lie spawned by the government to target her specifically."
Addy isn't the only tough nut that Sera meets while she's sniffing around, and as she inquires into Rachel's whereabouts, she hears spurious things and faces hostility that's in discombobulating contrast to the book's bucolic setting. Brazier's unsettling thriller is really about two missing women: one who seems to have been taken against her will and her putative rescuer, who is convinced that only by disappearing from her old life can she find herself. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer