My review

A book of heartbreak twisted in deep with mystery. A mother feeling the loss of her child deep in the marrow,  always and forever, the pain bleeding out, sometimes expected, sometimes totally unexpected. A husband, an affair, a mistake, a threat, and a new life. But past seeping slowly into the present, like the eerie claustrophobic fog, creepy and sinuous, attacking the lives, winding its way around, till it starts choking and attacking them all

The atmosphere is wild, the roads are twisted, the winds blow willy nilly, the characters collide when they were meant to be away and locked in solitary. The jealousy invades deep into the psyche. The guilt cores the soul. The decisions pull apart when they should be together. The sinister tricks, the death omens, the deja vu. The girl who never was. The daughter who is gone and the daughter whom no one can see. 

All this is found in the daughter by Lucy Dawson. And what a spinner of a tale she has written. What I thought the book was, and what it turned out to be is quite chilling. Lucy has kept the atmosphere of the book extremely gripping, every page has an incident which makes the previous one look milder. 

The story is simple, Jess lost her 5 year old daughter in an accident in the playground, she leaves everything and seventeen years hence, she has settled into her new husband Ed and son. Then things start happening, in and around her, to make pay for the secrets of the past… 

I didn’t find the plot of the story and the reasons given very convincing, and I wanted something deeper from the plot. But this is overshadowed by Lucy’s writing, by the suspense that is weaved and entwined in the scenes and incidents. At one point, I didn’t know where the story was moving to, all I knew that it was leading to a crashing finale… And it did.. 

It crashed into all our lives, and I realized that sometimes the nightmares of the past are so dark that light of the present reality hardly penetrates. 

I read the book in the afternoon, and it took me awhile to process all that had happened. I was pretty hyped up, and at the same time shocked, by the reasonings of the characters and their decisions.

A winner of a book, an unputdownable, entertaining potboiler, where the pages turned on its own as the scenes brought the twists, the characters reasoned their way, and I was left shaken in the aftermath, wide-eyed and dry-mouthed. 

I received an ARC from NetGalley and publisher, Bookouture, and this is my honest and unbiased opinion. 

My rating : 4 stars 

About the Author 

Lucy Dawson has been a journalist and magazine editor, and continues to work as a plates instructor, alongside writing. She is 32 and lives in Tunbridge Wells. 

Book blurb 

Seventeen years ago, something happened to Jess’s daughter Beth. The memory of it still makes her blood run cold. Jess has tried everything to make peace with that day, and the part she played in what happened. It was only a brief moment of desire… but she’ll pay for it with a lifetime of guilt.
To distance herself from the mistakes of the past, Jess has moved away and started over with her family. But when terrifying things begin happening in her new home, Jess knows that her past has finally caught up with her. Somebody feels Jess hasn’t paid enough, and is determined to make her suffer for the secrets she’s kept all these years

Product Details 

Publication date : 24th January 2018

Publisher : Bookouture 

Language : English 

Available on Amazon