Book info

• Title Losing You
• Author Nicci French
• Year 2005
• Genre Thriller

The clock is ticking - and the search hasn't even begun... Nina Landry has given up city life for the isolated community of Sandling Island, lying off the bleak east coast of England. At night the wind howls. Sometimes they are cut off by the incoming tide. For Nina though it is home. It is safe. But when Nina's teenage daughter Charlie fails to return from a sleepover on the day they're due to go on holiday, the island becomes a different place altogether. A place of secrets and suspicions. Where no one - friends, neighbours or the police - believes Nina's instinctive fear that her daughter is in terrible danger. Alone, she undergoes a frantic search for Charlie. And as day turns to night, she begins to doubt not just whether they'll leave the island for their holiday - but whether they will ever leave it again.

Thoughts

I didn’t enjoy this as much as other Nicci French books, it felt far more drawn out and a lot less of a thriller. The story is a young girl going missing and we spend the entire novel chasing around a small partial island with her mother as she tries to track down clues.

It did feel as though Nina, the mother, was recklessly dashing this way and that without a real clue what she was looking for - which is probably exactly how a parent would behave, I don’t know. The trouble is, that doesn’t make for a good story. As much as I knew Nina would be the one to end up stumbling over the truth, I sort of wanted to shout at her to at least listen to the police - they weren’t deliberately trying to hinder the investigation.

The final reveal comes about so quickly, after such a long time spent stringing things along, that it didn’t feel as satisfying as it should have. It was a relatively happy ending, but I still felt there was a lot left unsaid - most of all, was the boyfriend still stuck on the M25?? In the end, not my favourite, but certainly interesting enough.

Rating: 3 / 5