Since She’s Been Gone

• Author: Sagit Schwarz
• Genre: Mystery/Suspense
• Publication Date: February 6, 2024
• Publisher: Crooked Lane Books

Thank you to NetGalley and Crooked Lane Books for providing me with an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

CONTENT WARNING: eating disorder, death of a parent, self-harm, stalking, cancer, miscarriage, mention of addiction, mention of death of a child

An emotionally charged, dual-timeline suspense set between L. A. and NYC, this debut novel is perfect for fans of The Last Thing He Told Me and Luckiest Girl Alive.

A clinical psychologist is thrown into her dark past as she races to uncover the truth about her mother’s death while struggling with her own mental health.

Can we ever truly know the people we love?

Losing her mother to a hit-and-run at age 15 threw Beatrice “Beans” Bennett’s life into turmoil. Bereft, she developed a life-threatening eating disorder, and went through a challenging recovery process which paved the way for her work as a clinical psychologist decades later. 

When a new patient arrives at her office and insists that Beans’s mother is still alive—and in danger—Beans is forced to revisit her past in order to uncover the truth. She learns the “patient” is a member of a notorious family that owns a drug company largely responsible for the national opioid epidemic, and that her mother was once tangled in their web. In a race against time—and her mother’s assailants—while once again facing the disorder she thought she’d put behind her, Beans discovers that, like herself, her mother had a devastating secret. 

With its fast-moving, edge-of-your-seat action and intimate look at mental health, Since She’s Been Gone will keep readers in its grasp long after the last page.

This book came across my radar a while before it came out, and I was intrigued right away. At first, I discovered it through a Jewish bookstagrammer’s post about upcoming books by Jewish authors, but it stood out because there aren’t as many mystery/thriller books that I see. Naturally, I couldn’t pass up the chance to read this one, although I was a bit nervous about the mental health elements and how they would be presented. By the end of the book, I was blown away by this debut.

The characters were great. Beatrice ‘Beans’ Bennett was an easy character to empathize with—she went through a chain of very difficult experiences in her adolescence and early adulthood, where her mother’s death led to her life feeling out of control to her, and the reader gets to see this side of Beans through flashbacks of her coping with these feelings by restricting her food until she has slowly developed an eating disorder.And it becomes serious very quickly. We get a raw, unfiltered view of the thoughts that go through the head of a person with an active eating disorder. Her recovery is a difficult one, and she’s faced with so many challenges.

I looked forward the most to the chapters with Beans in the present day. At 41, she is a licensed psychotherapist, and has done some work on herself. She’s in recovery from her eating disorder, which takes daily focus and attention. And when she receives shocking news about the mother she thought she lost decades ago, it threatens to cause her to spiral. As more secrets are revealed, much of the progress Beans has made starts to unravel. She begins to struggle with eating disordered thoughts in a voice that she is familiar with, and refers to as ED. The more information that Beans discovers, the more danger she is in, and the more she is racing against her eating disorder. 

A little digging into the background of the patient who drops the bombshell on Beans reveals that she’s connected to this family who is behind a huge Pharma company that’s getting sued for misrepresenting their drug as less addictive when they knew that was a lie. (Sound familier *cough OxyContin cough*) And then, the plot thickens when further digging reveals that her mother had a connection to the same family and the same pharmaceutical drugs before Beans was born. So now she’s in danger from the family who wants to keep her quiet about what she might find out, and the stress from that is making the eating disorder worse. 

The plot is relatively even-paced, although it does speed up quite a bit near the end, although that’s to be expected. All the tension and mystery and suspense that has been building up gets resolved at a faster pace, but it didn’t feel rushed. There was one part of the story that did feel a bit over the top, but other than that, I genuinely enjoyed the story. The dual timeline mysteries kept me hooked on both of them, while I normally tend to like one timeline over the other. But I think what won me over the most about this book and this author is the fact that Schwartz is a licensed psychotherapist, and does absolute justice as to what therapy is like, has experience with eating disorders, and can translate her lived experiences into her written fiction. Overall, this was a wonderful job, especially for a debut, and I’m incredibly impressed. I’ll absolutely be keeping an eye out for whatever Schwartz puts out in the future!

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links, and I may earn a small commission at no cost to you if you purchase through my links.