"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: "I sometimes wonder if I'm destined to disappear. You said this on March 27, your final episode, and then you disappeared. No podcasts, no posts."
Sera knows from Rachel's podcasts that she broadcasts from a house at Fountain Creek Guest Ranch, which is run by her parents and located just outside Happy Camp, in Northern California. Sera drives the three hours from her apartment to the property, where she meets Rachel's mother, Addy, and tells her that she's looking for work. Since Sera has experience with horses, Addy hires her to tend to the animals. Addy assigns Sera to the staff cabin on the ranch, which has no guests and only one other hired hand, and discourages her from talking to the locals. When Sera asks why, Addy says, "Would you want to hang around a bunch of liars?" 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. As for Sera's own reliability, she is self-aware enough to question the advisability of her mission but resents what she's starting to see as the routine pathologizing of women operating on the margins: "She was crazy, she was a bitch, she was alone. You never fit, and so you make more sense a mystery, a disappearance." 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
Shelf Talker: In this alluringly unsettling thriller, a fangirl travels to a Northern California ranch to look into the disappearance of a female podcaster who, as it happens, does stories about missing women.