If I Disappear by Eliza Jane Brazier
Well… Going to be very honest here, like I always am. This book kinda sucked. I rated this book an extremely generous two stars. My first two-star book of 2025. That’s either really good luck with my picking this year, or I need to be tougher. If I Disappear is a mystery, crime novel that follows our girl Sera Fleece. She has, what I think, is a very unhealthy relationship with her favorite podcast, hosted by a small-town girl, Rachel. Why do you ask, that I think she might have an obsessive, parasocial relationship with this person she has never met before or even talked to, proceeded to wiggle herself into staying at her family’s home, taking over her job, and living vicariously through a missing girl that she is determined her family killed off. Right…. Anyways, the story starts with Sera noticing there is something wrong with Rachel’s podcast upload schedule. There haven’t been any uploads in a few months, which I’m assuming (it’s never said), is every week. Here is a quote from the third paragraph in the first chapter: “In your worst moments, you said, I sometimes wonder if I’m destined to disappear.”. Now, any normal person would simply ask for a welfare check on this person and leave it at that. But Sera Fleece has the idea that something horrible has taken place.
When I first bought this book, the premise seemed very interesting to me. A true crime podcaster who reports on missing people goes missing herself. It seems too good to be true, because it is. There wasn’t much investigating going on. Sera just kinda inserted herself into Rachel’s life. Sera thought it would be a great idea to travel to Northern California and knock on her family’s small town guest ranch and ask for a job. Sera spends her time moping around and throwing herself a pity party because she’s a 30-something-year-old woman with no kids, divorced, and left with no job. This attitude goes on for the whole book, by the way. Eliza tries to implement a romance aspect, but it is very short-lived and a little corny. Almost everyone slept with this guy, and she decides to sleep with this man because she has no self-respect. Not my words, hers.
While Sera is working on the ranch, tending to the horses and cleaning windows… lots of cleaning windows. At night, she commences her “investigating”. I use that term very lightly because all it is, is Sera walking down a game trail to a little house in the woods, and then getting too scared to approach, and then she turns back. Yep, that’s it. She also just asks a few friends of Rachel’s to see if there were any holes in anyone’s story, and the more she asked around, I guess the more people got scared because then the whole thing falls apart. People start confessing, and others wind up dead, some missing. It just seems very convenient, especially since Sera did absolutely nothing.
So, anyway, to conclude. This book was such a letdown. To wrap it up in a cute box with a super cute bow on top. A stalker woman named Sera is convinced that her favorite true crime podcaster is missing because she once said that she is destined to go missing. Sera self-inserts into Rachel’s life by living in her house, sleeping in her childhood bedroom, sleeping with her man, riding her horse, and being a replacement daughter to her two parents. Oh, I almost forgot; all while trying to find out what happened to Rachel, by just talking to a few folks in town, and getting scared halfway through. Yep, definitely a sad, sad, two-star rating. Could’ve been worse, I guess! Maybe not? Ugh, I dont know.
