The Night She Disappeared

Kim Knox is Tallulah’s earthy, young-looking mom. A divorcee, she is often lonely, but she is totally devoted to her children and her grandson Noah. Kim represents selfless and pure maternal love—something other mothers in the novel do not often display.

After Tallulah’s disappearance, Kim is the locus of the novel’s pathos—a mother desperate for her daughter’s safe return. Devastated by loss and grief, Kim struggles to cope and raise Noah—but the novel never paints her as passive. Instead, Kim exhorts the police to keep up their investigation, keeps her daughter’s memory alive in the town through vigils and memorials, and eagerly leaps in to help Sophie sleuth. Kim is formidable in the face of tragedy, and she is satisfyingly rewarded at the end of the novel with a joyous reunion with her daughter.

Sophie Beck, the least fleshed out of the three main characters, is a writer who moves to the novel’s small town in a desperate bid to stay with her boyfriend. Sophie begins investigating Tallulah and Zach’s disappearance to cope with her writer’s block. Sophie’s arc revolves around admitting to herself that leaving London was a mistake. Like Tallulah, Sophie is swept up in what she imagines will be a glamorous life: being the girlfriend of the head of a swanky private school.

Sophie is a character typical of the mystery novel genre: an enthusiastic lay person whose determined investigations uncover much more than the detective work of professionals. In this case, while the police flail to find any clues about what happened to Tallulah and Zach, stymied in part by Scarlett’s uber-wealthy father, Sophie makes tremendous progress, helping to find Tallulah.

Scarlett is an artistic, deeply troubled young woman who uses people. Her friends are obsessed with her—as Mimi puts it, Scarlett “has this way of making you think you’d be nothing without her […] there’s always the threat that she would cut you out” (356). This intoxicating effect has a sexual element, as multiple characters—Liam, Guy Croft, and Tallulah—can’t help but desperately want her.

The more we learn about Scarlett, the clearer it becomes that she is at least somewhat mentally unbalanced. Her mother is a cold, calculating psychopath; as a young teen, Scarlett is the survivor of rape by a teacher; and her family is so wealthy, they live in an almost unreal world of privilege and aloofness.

Though Tallulah sees Scarlett as an escape, Scarlett actually only offers a different kind of abuse: Where Zach is physically violent, Scarlett is psychologically manipulative. Still, in the end, Scarlett confesses the truth about happened with Tallulah and Zach, which implies that Scarlett is worthy of redemption.