REVIEW: LOSING YOU, BY NICCI FRENCH

Nina Landry awakens on her fortieth birthday, anticipating a day filled with excitement. She, her new boyfriend, and her two children are taking a trip—leaving their home on Sandling Island, off the coast of England, for a dream vacation. As soon as her fifteen-year-old daughter, Charlie, returns from a sleepover, they can get ready to leave.

But Charlie doesn’t come home at the expected time. Nina can’t believe of all days, Charlie has chosen this day to be late. As minutes and then hours tick by, Nina’s annoyance soon changes to concern, and then to a chilling certainty that something terrible has happened.

The police insist there’s no reason to worry—yet. Teenagers are unreliable, impulsive. Nina always thought she and Charlie had a solid, trusting relationship, but seeking out Charlie’s friends for clues to her whereabouts makes her reconsider. How well does Nina know her daughter, really? How well can a parent ever know a child? And will everything Nina doesn’t know—about Charlie, her neighbors, even the friends and family closest to them—prove fatal…?

With a fast and intense pace, Losing You begins on Nina Landry’s 40th birthday, just as she and her two children, Charlie and Jackson, are about to head for Florida with her new boyfriend Christian. But nothing goes according to plan, and for the whole long day and into the night, Nina is searching for her daughter who might have run away…or something dreadful could have happened to her.

The police bumbled along throughout the day, seemingly wasting time by questioning the wrong people and trying to take Nina’s statement over and over again; meanwhile she has been putting things together after asking her own questions and reading Charlie’s diary. She knows she doesn’t have time to waste and subjecting herself to the endless questioning will keep her from saving her daughter.

Throughout, I was breathless as I trailed after Nina’s thought processes while she kept following the clues. There were many possible suspects…and just as the stumbled upon the most unexpected one, she might be too late. I held my breath as we zeroed in on the answers. A brilliant 5 star read.

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