The Daughter's Secret by Eva Holland

Synopsis

My daughter is a liar. A liar, liar, liar. And I'm starting to see where she gets it from.

When Rosalind's fifteen-year-old daughter, Stephanie, ran away with her teacher, this ordinary family became something it had never asked to be. Their lives held up to scrutiny in the centre of a major police investigation, the Simms were headline news while Stephanie was missing with a man who was risking everything.

Now, six years on, Ros takes a call that will change their lives all over again. He's going to be released from prison. Years too early. In eleven days' time.

As Temperley's release creeps ever closer, Ros is forced to confront the events that led them here, back to a place she thought she'd left behind, to questions she didn't want to answer. Why did she do it? Where does the blame lie? What happens next?

Review

This book’s synopsis was instantly appealing to me, seeming to fit into the mysteries and thrillers I have been reading more of over the past year or so. This book to me was different to how I expected it though. I was expecting it to be more mysterious and joining Ros uncovering the secrets and lies that her daughter, Stephanie might have. While the past was slightly mysterious, I was expecting more twist and turns on the way. 

That said, I found it compelling reading as the characterisation was absolutely superb. Each character was complex with there own flaws. The flaws I found very prominent in each character, and we all have them, but they were so that I didn’t really like any of the characters. This didn’t put me off the book at all, as they were all fascinating. 
The father seemed more concerned about image and how people outside would view his family, and threw himself away from the family almost in disdain at times it seemed.  Stephanie seemed grown up most of the time, but at times almost child-like, and I suppose this is growing up with Rosalind as a mother. 

I don’t necessarily think Ros was a bad mother, but her inner thoughts were terrifying. She suffers from paranoia and anxiety about bad stuff happening to her children beyond what I believe to be normal. From stuff like, driving your child to a school trip behind their school coach as the tyres on the coach look too worn (even when reassured they’re only a couple of months old) to the even more unlikely scenario of something falling from the sky, and through the house to where her children are sat. This occurred before the situation with Stephanie, so it seems like the children were a bit mollycoddled growing up, and actually I would have loved to read more from their childhood to see how far it went. 

Obviously everyone is concerned what happens to their children, but what surprises me the most really was that Ros didn’t seek any help from anyone. Dan was all to happy to send Stephanie off to a rehab clinic when he thought she had an alcohol problem, but seemed oblivious to his wife’s problems, or at least not concerned enough. She hid it, but even when Dan found out she was keeping her children off school at times because of the worry and anxieties she was feeling, he just let it go… All very puzzling. However, it’s this very thing that drew me into the book, and made me compelled to read further. Seeing what she was thinking, and her panic was what kept the tension up, rather than it being a mystery to discover secrets. 

I had to read the last page or two a few times, and, even now, I’m still not sure that I am satisfied that I know what the the conclusion was. However, I realise many books in this genre have an open ending similar to this one, and lots of people will really like this. 

Overall though, this is a great debut novel, it was a compelling read that kept me hooked till the end.

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Published by: Orion
Gratefully received from the Publisher for review.