Review:My Wife Is Missing by D. J. Palmer

When a woman disappears with her two children, one husband will do anything to find them--even confront the secrets of his own past--in D. J. Palmer's My Wife Is Missing, a twisty thriller from the author of The New Husband.

A family vacation turns into a nightmare for Michael Hart when he discovers his wife and two children have disappeared from their New York City hotel room. Horrified, he fears they’ve been kidnapped. Michael’s frantic search to find them takes a shocking turn when he discovers that his wife, Natalie, appears to have left quite willingly, taking their children with her. The police want to know why, and so does Michael. But there may be a reason why Natalie ran, something Michael can’t tell the police—the truth about his past.

While untangling his deceptions might be the key to locating Natalie, Michael knows it could also be his undoing. To find his wife, he must now turn to the one person capable of exposing all that he’s been hiding. Natalie thinks she has Michael all figured out and has hatched a plan to escape from him permanently. One detail, though, threatens to derail her efforts: sleep—or more accurately, the lack of it. Since the moment the shocking revelations about her husband came to light, Natalie’s insomnia has worsened to the point that she now suffers from delusions.

Are her fears about Michael valid—or a symptom of her condition? With her children’s lives at risk, the stakes for Natalie could not be higher. On her own, running low on energy and resources, avoiding increasingly close calls with Michael—who is on the hunt and closing in fast—Natalie needs someone to turn to for help. But who can she trust when she can’t even trust herself?

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What I thought about My Wife Is Missing

Michael Hart takes his family to New York City on a vacation, only to find them missing when he brings some pizza back to the hotel room. The opening of this mystery/psychological thriller  grabbed me right away.

The first complication is that Natalie isn't all that stable -- she has insomnia and some other issues that may or may not be related to her sleep deprivation.  There is a dual pov to help fill in the blanks, and at times both characters are unlikable.

Since this is a mystery, I don't want to spoil anything, so I'm not going to get into the details of the plot.  There's more to things and bigger reveals as the story moves along.  The middle is a bit slow and repeats and the big payoff is in the last twenty five percent of the book.  There are secrets.  There are twists.  The question becomes which one do you believe?  Even though some of the plot elements were a touch unrealistic, it did keep me guessing.

Overall, I did enjoy this story and it worked for me as a mystery/psychological thriller as long as I didn't spend a lot of time questioning things and just went with the flow of the story, which was okay by me.