Title: Losing You
Author: Nicci French
Genre: Thriller, Mystery
Length: 304
Rating: 3 Star
Description/Synopsis:
Nina Landry is supposed to be taking her two children on a Christmas holiday today. But the road away from Sandling Island seems littered with obstacles. Most pressing of all, her 15-year-old daughter, Charlie, has yet to return from a night out …Minute by minute, Nina’s unease builds to worry and then panic. Has Charlie run away? Or has something more sinister happened to her? And why will nobody take her disappearance seriously? As a series of half-buried secrets lead Nina from sickening suspicion to deadly certainty, the question becomes less whether she and her daughter will leave the island for Christmas – and more whether they’ll ever leave it again.
Review – MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS
This is the second time I have read this book but it still managed to keep me agitated and caught up in what was happening. I think on its own merit the book is a 4 but as to my personal preference it was a 3.
The plot of the story is simple enough. A mother is supposed to take her children on a holiday but then the daughter doesn’t turn up to a few of the things she was supposed to and the mother begins to worry, even when no one else does. She then has to rush around the town to try and find her daughter. The events of the book happen over just a single day, and by the time I was done reading the book I felt just as exhausted as I am sure Nina felt. The plot had be so agitated in a good way that I wanted to put the book down repeatedly so I could have a break from the feelings it was making me have. I think because of how fast paced it was, the first time I read it I didn’t guess at to who was behind Charlie’s disappearance. There really wasn’t enough time for guessing.
Writing wise I think the only thing that really needs mentioning is that this book does not contain chapters, which I think was a fantastic little ‘trick’ in terms of writing. This, the fact it happens over one day, and the way Nina is just frantically going from place to place just keeps you so hooked and frantic with her. There is not a break for you to recover.
A downfall to the shortness of the book/day and the pace means that there wasn’t really much time to give some of the characters depth. They were there to annoy, hate, through you off, but other than that they had not more to them. The police were totally useless in the story, Rory was stupid and way too easy to hate, and Joel was just as stupid as stupid can be. I also had no idea why on Earth Renata was even in the story. Was she there to try and make things more complicated? She was just confusing. Then all the teenagers except for one were made out to be the most difficult people on the face of the Earth, which I took a bit of an offense too. Just because they are teenagers doesn’t mean they are going to give someone a hard time when they are looking for their child.
Nina annoyed me probably the most and she tended to have random thoughts that didn’t seem to fit whatever situation she was in at the time. I am going to put this down to shock, but it might have just been because she was a poor character. I did feel so sorry for her brother Jackson though, he just got pushed to the side and didn’t really understand what was happening. He was just there by himself.
I plan on reading this book again when the mood strikes, and I think others should pick it up also. I would recommend this book to anyone who likes fast paced thrillers that are really easy to read. This book is not complicated, but it is good.
Till Next Time…
