The Sunday morning starts like any other, aside from the slight hangover. Dani Keller wakes up on her Seattle houseboat, a headache building behind her eyes from the wine she drank at a party the night before. But on this particular Sunday morning, she’s surprised to see that her husband, Ian, is not home. As the hours pass, Dani fills her day with small things. But still, Ian does not return. Irritation shifts to worry, worry slides almost imperceptibly into panic. And then, like a relentless blackness, the terrible realization hits Dani: He’s gone.
As the police work methodically through all the logical explanations—he’s hurt, he’s run off, he’s been killed—Dani searches frantically for a clue as to whether Ian is in fact dead or alive. And, slowly, she unpacks their relationship, holding each moment up to the light: from its intense, adulterous beginning, to the grandeur of their new love, to the difficulties of forever. She examines all the sins she can—and cannot—remember. As the days pass, Dani will plumb the depths of her conscience, turning over and revealing the darkest of her secrets in order to discover the hard truth—about herself, her husband, and their lives together.
When I picked up this book, I thought it was going to be a mystery/thriller about the search for a missing husband. Instead, this is really a book about the complexities of love and marriage and relationships and family. The fact that Dani's husband is missing is the central element of the plot, but the meat of the story is Dani's exploration of their life together to try to unearth clues about his disappearance. The book is well-written and in places a moving read, though there were also moments where I found Dani's passivity rather irritating. Nevertheless, this novel was a great read, one I would not hesitate to recommend.
