Stolen Child by Laura Elliot

A parent's worst nightmare in every sense of the word. Someone takes your child and you probably never know what happened to him or her. The worst thing being the not knowing.

That's the situation Carla and Robert find themselves in. Their two-day-old baby has been taken and there are no clues to her whereabouts or who might have taken her.

Simultaneously the reader gets to hear the kidnappers side of the story, and as the years go on they also get to know the missing child. Sue commits an act of sheer desperation. I would like to say in a moment of confusion, but the fact is she planned the who and how.

She knew exactly what she was doing when she stole Isobel/Joy. A part of her can never resign herself to the facts and the guilt. There always seems to a barrier between her emotions for the child and being able to love her properly.

It's fascinating to see the way the child and the pseudo mother find it hard to bond, however later when the kidnapper is gone the child is devastated.

People who steal children don't just steal a child, they steal their lives and those of their real parents. They steal the memories they could have made and the bonds that should have been built. The Stolen children return as strangers and find it hard to reconnect to their real parents. No one can give you back missing years.

The premise is ok, but the writing style can do with little more finesse.

Buy Stolen Child at Amazon UK or go to Goodreads for any other retailer.

Stranger Child by Rachel Abbott

Rachel Abbott is growing with each book and she certainly knows how to combine psychological tension with taboos, the dysfunctional with the depraved and still manage to keep the story realistic.

The story focuses on the disappearance of a young child and her unexplained reappearance many years later. One day she is just suddenly stood at the door, as if she had never been missing at all.

At that moment Natasha is the intruder, a threat to Emma and her small family. Emma knows instinctively that something isn't quite right, and she reacts like any mother would when she perceives a threat to her child.

The young girl is sullen, silent and there seems to be underlying aggression, especially towards the very people she should be glad to see.That in itself isn't unusual and it is common for 'returned' children to feel displaced, to feel anger and to feel out-of-place.

Emma has a gut feeling about Natasha, which her husband isn't interested in, and she quite frankly should have listed to her inner voice. Instead she trusts his good judgement and in doing so puts her baby in danger.

From the very beginning there was one person who didn't react the way they should have. It raised my suspicions and made for a much more sinister plot. The fact that this person could be at the bottom of everything puts a completely new slant on the whole story.

I really liked the way Abbott wasn't afraid to end the book the way she did. The circle doesn't have to be completed, not every thread needs to be tied off and not every story needs a predictably happy ending.

I received a copy of this book courtesy of the author.

Buy Stranger Child at Amazon UK or go to Goodreads for any other retailer.

Read And So It Begins, Read Kill Me Again, Read The Back Road, Read Nowhere Child,  Read Sleep Tight, Read Come a Little Closer, all by Rachel Abbott.

Above by Isla Morley

Morley has this knack of combining the most uncomfortable, taboo and heinous issues with the simultaneous feelings of morality, guilt, compassion and forgiveness. This author has the ability to cloud something which would seem like a straightforward crime, with doubt and uncertainty.

Above certainly fits into that difficult category. The reader and victim start out disliking and fearing the perpetrator and end up understanding the compulsive necessity of his actions, despite the deplorable nature of his crimes.

It is a tightrope walk of emotions; Hatred, disgust, anger, fear and hopelessness.  The reader sinks with Blythe into a hole of despair and can feel even ounce of hope leave her. Drip by drip,  day by day until suddenly years have gone by. We sit there with her deep beneath the ground. In darkness, listening to the silence of her tomb, knowing that no person will ever find her.

The fear turns into a Stockholm Syndrome like dependency. She resigns herself to her fate, especially when she has to consider that of her child.

This is when it gets interesting from an emotional point of view. She views herself as the protector, the mother, but in fact she has become the captor. She is now aiding and enabling her own kidnapper.

I think the real eye opener is possibility of the conspiracy theorist being right. That makes him look like a saviour instead of a criminal. The reader and the victim start to question the validity of their prior judgement.

As always Morley paints a frightening picture of the abyss of deviancy humans are capable of, with a large portion of apocalyptic terror.

I received a copy of this book courtesy of Gallery Books via Edelweiss.