Good Half Gone
Author: Tarryn Fisher
Publication Date: March 19, 2024
Publisher: Graydon House
Genre: Mystery, Thriller, Fiction
Note: This review is for an ARC and is my unbiased opinion.
Rating: ★ ★ ★
Synopsis:
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Wives
Iris Walsh saw her twin sister, Piper, get kidnapped—so why does no one believe her?
Iris narrowly escaped her pretty, popular twin sister’s fate as a teen: kidnapped, trafficked and long gone before the cops agreed to investigate. With no evidence to go on but a few scattered memories, the case quickly goes cold.
Now an adult, Iris wants one thing—proof. And if the police still won’t help, she’ll just have to find it her own way; by interning at the isolated Shoal Island Hospital for the criminally insane, where secrets lurk in the shadows and are kept under lock and key. But Iris soon realizes that something even more sinister is simmering beneath the surface of the Shoal, and that the patients aren’t the only ones being observed…
Tarryn Fisher is one of my must-read authors. I’ve read all of her books, and I couldn’t wait to get my hands on Good Half Gone. That was before I even read the blurb, then I was even more excited. I hate to say it, but I might have overhyped the book to myself. While I liked it, I didn’t love it as much as I expected.
Good Half Gone starts out explosively with the day Iris’s twin sister Piper is abducted. Those first few chapters really drew me in and hooked me. After that, the suspense dried up for a bit and the pace slowed down. I felt like I was being told rather than shown at some points. I also found myself confused at times. I had a hard time connecting what was happening in the past to the present. It makes more sense now that I’m done reading, but it took a while to feel a connection between teenage Iris and 20-something Iris because of how each timeline jumped around. Which was weird because both timelines were interesting in their own ways. One thing that didn’t help was the amount of attention placed on unimportant details. A lot of information was given that sometimes mattered, but most times didn’t. That was probably meant to make it harder to figure out what was coming, but it just bogged things down a bit and didn’t keep me from guessing some of the twists. The Shoal Island Hospital stuff was both creepy and intriguing. I could picture the island and its terrain, the uncomfortable weather on the ferry, and the buildings and their inhabitants. The intensity picked back up at about seventy-five percent in when all unbelievable craziness broke lose. It might not have been believable, but it was a lot of fun to read.
So, yeah. I had mixed feelings about this book. This was a hard review to write because it was hard to figure out what did and didn’t work for me. There’s no doubt Tarryn Fisher knows how to create a twisted tale with a whole lot of atmosphere, but this story needed something in the middle. I don’t know if that’s narrowing down the information that is given or making Iris a little easier to connect to. If you are good at suspending disbelief in the end, you might like this thriller set in the darker, grittier side of the Pacific Northwest.