The Case of the Missing Boyfriend (The Missing Boyfriend)

by Nick Alexander

[Leah]

When I heard about Nick Alexander’s novel The Case of the Missing Boyfriend, I thought it sounded like a really interesting read. I was curious as to why CC, this girl with a fab job, lovely home and living in one of the best cities in the world could be so down in the dumps about not having a boyfriend. In this day and age it’s ok for women to be career girls and for them not to want to just be mothers. So I was very curious as to why CC wanted the man and the farm and the babies. Mostly though I was just curious about what CC stood for – I’m weird like that. So I started it with quite big expectations. It’s been we’ll received on Amazon and it seemed as if I would really enjoy it, but sadly for me that didn’t quite work out.

For me, The Case of the Missing Boyfriend was all about this missing boyfriend. It pretty much drove the whole novel and for a novel that’s over 400 pages that’s a lot of words about one missing person! I just found it so hard to first get into the novel and second to care for CC. For a lot of the book CC comes across as quite a cold person, even to her friends she doesn’t show much warmth. She treats them quite poorly actually, especially the gay friends she’s always taking the mick out of and being sarcastic about. In a Chick Lit novel friends make the book go around and CC sort of ignored hers. Her best friend SJ is hardly around when she should have been utilised so much better especially with what she was going through. It felt like Alexander couldn’t be bothered about going into depth with SJ and so left her to rot until CC remembered she had a best friend!

There’s a large gay presence in the novel – all of CC’s friends are gay in fact except SJ, which isn’t something you always come across in Chick Lit and I thought it was a good thing, although I found it rather overwhelming to keep up with all of the characters. Mark, Darren, Ian, Victor, etc. There wasn’t enough dividing characteristics to set them apart from each other and I found it quite a challenge remembering who was who. There was a lot left to be desired when it came to CC’s friendships is all I’ll say. Even the romantic lead didn’t stand out at all! He was invisible for ages, right til the very end, with only the one scene before that where I didn’t even remember his presence. I just found it such a hard book to care about because I just couldn’t keep up with all the people and there wasn’t enough time dedicated to them for us to know then properly.

I wanted to like the book, but it was a bit of a slog. It got to the point where I was so sick of listening to CC moaning about her single life and talking about her job and I just switched off. One thing that really rankled was CC’s aversion to her real name which wasn’t even that bad, I thought it was ignorant of her to call it chavvy. There are far worse names out there, lemme tell you. The book just didn’t work for me at all, sadly. I felt it could have delved so much better into the supporting characters lives and that even CC’s own relationships weren’t inspected too deeply. We’re told of these horror boyfriends she’s had but we don’t really get to experience why these relationships seemingly scarred her for life. For a 400 page book it was lacking in the important details and I just couldn’t get into it at all.