Losing You by Nicci French - A Review

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Blurb About The Book

​In this thrilling standalone novel from the internationally bestselling author of the Frieda Klein series, a woman’s frantic search for her missing daughter unveils a nefarious web of secrets and lies.

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…?
Losing You once again proves that Nicci French is at the height of their storytelling powers in a clever, mind-bending thriller that has readers guessing at every twist and turn.

Review

This was the first book I have read by author Nicci French, (which for the record I found out later is actually a husband and wife team writing under one pen name), and it will probably be the last. 

Sometimes publishers randomly send me things they think I would like to review.  Sometimes I look at the book and wonder what the hell they were thinking, but that is beside the point.

Losing You has been sitting on my TBR shelf for a while.  I am definitely a fan of a good psychological thriller when I am in the right mood, but in this case the mood was there, the good thriller was not.

The tagline promises heart-pounding from the first page.  Having finished the book I did look on Amazon, and there are actually a surprisingly large amount of positive editorial reviews, all praising this thrilling adventure.  I seriously have to wonder if I was reading the same book.

The story is slow, even allowing for scene-setting (which I understand as this is set in a little island off the English coastline), but once the drama starts, it just seems to flail about, never really allowing the reader to get a good grasp on what's supposed to be happening.

If that wasn't bad enough, even pushing this away from a thriller, and out into fantasy land, I fail to see how this could work.  For me 90% of the choices made, both writing and story were not good.  Annoyingly I did care enough to want to know Charlie's fate, but some of that could be because by the halfway point I knew this review was going to be on the unfavorable side and this would either help redeem it, or, as what actually happened, just let it sink entirely. 

I don't know if anyone has read any of "Nicci French's" other works? But this was a big no from me and a sad 1 1/2 stars.