All Things Cease to Appear: A novel

All Things Cease To Appear is the story of George Clare, who comes home from work one day to find that his wife is murdered and his three-year-old daughter is the only witness. They had recently moved into an old farmhouse that had a tragic past in rural, upstate New York. The murder occurs in early nineteen seventy-nine, yet the story follows George from when he first met his wife until the end of the book, twenty-five years after the murder. Most of the suspicion falls on George and slowly events come to light that reveal what kind of person he really is.

This novel is not a who-done-it kind of mystery. It is more the why and what led to this tragic story. It was unique in that there are no quotation marks in the entire book. That did make it interesting, but sometimes it made it very difficult to tell if the character was speaking or if they were just having a thought. The author also changed perspectives quite often and I didn’t realize until I was half way through a page that I was seeing from a different character’s eyes than I was a couple of paragraphs earlier.

Overall, a thought-provoking read with a great storyline. It was a little bit hard to get used to the lack of quotation marks, though.