Fourteen years ago, Matthew Lindstrom’s ex-wife Gwen disappeared. His career and reputation were destroyed as he was labelled a murderer. Now, he receives an anonymous phone call that tells him Gwen is alive and living in the town of Cyanide Wells, outside of San Francisco. He goes looking for answers, but it is not long before his future is threatened again.

The concept of the wife disappearing and the husband being blamed, or not believed, has been seen before, most famously in ‘The Vanishing’. However, Muller is able to put an original spin on the plot by creating enormous changes in Gwen’s life and making her a character of which the reader sees very little. The reader is given very little opportunity to understand her on her owns, but has to see her through the eyes of the two principal protagonists, Matthew Lindstrom and Carly McGuire, the owner of the newspaper where Gwen works.

In ‘Cyanide Wells’, Muller often swaps viewpoints, going from Lindstrom to McGuire. She fills in many details about their lives before this point, allowing us to have well-rounded characters. Her success in creating these is one of the successes of the novel. There is also a reasonable sense of place, designed to heighten the isolated and trapped atmosphere that surrounds Gwen Lindstrom.

The plot itself is not particularly complex at first, but it soon starts to spin out into tangents, making a bigger mystery than it first seemed. The solution to it is rather mundane in the end and does not deliver the big punch that the reader may first assume.

‘Cyanide Wells’ is not a bad novel. Indeed, it is a very pleasant summer read. Muller flirts with darkness briefly when she mentions shocking murders, but overall, the novel makes for light reading. It is destined to be a swimming pool read - fast, simple, yet rather fun.