Product Description

Nina Landry has given up city life for the isolated community of Sandling Island, lying off the bleak east coast of England. At night the wind howls. Sometimes they are cut off by the incoming tide. For Nina though it is home. It is safe. But when Nina's teenage daughter Charlie fails to return from a sleepover on the day they're due to go on holiday, the island becomes a different place altogether. A place of secrets and suspicions. Where no one--friends, neighbours or the police--believes Nina's instinctive fear that her daughter is in terrible danger. Alone, she undergoes a frantic search for Charlie. And as day turns to night, she begins to doubt not just whether they'll leave the island for their holiday--but whether they will ever leave it again.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #55247 in Books
• Published on: 2008-03-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

About the Author
Nicci French is the pseudonym for the writing partnership of journalists Nicci Gerrard and Sean French. The couple are married and live in Suffolk. There are nine other bestselling novels by Nicci French: The Memory Game, The Safe House, Killing Me Softly, Beneath the Skin, The Red Room, Land of the Living, Secret Smile, Catch Me When I Fall and Until it's Over (hardback March 08).

Customer Reviews

Interesting but somewhat lacking...
It must be every parents nightmare - just before you are about to leave for your much anticipated holiday your 15 year old daughter goes missing. The emotions going from mild annoyance to baited concern right through to out right terror. This is what Nina Landry must go through as her daughter Charlie is missing...

The premise is interesting and the setting (a small island on the Thames Estuary) has a really repressive feel for Nina and I love the way this is written. You can feel oppressive nature of the environment as the major players around the location pull in around one and other with Nina still feeling as somewhat the outsider.

Nina has to force the local police force to move forward with the investigation and helpful neighbours who harbour their own issues with Nina are not helping. Nina however is a mother with the bit between her teeth and knows this is a race - but will she win?

I enjoyed the beginning and middle of the books, the character development was up to Nicci French's high standards and there was a smattering of tension to fill the pages but I did find the killer instinct to be somewhat lacking and I thought this let the book down. We have come to expect page turning shockers from the author and the change of direction is as welcome as it is unexpected but I feel this style of book is going to take some refinement. It is probably a harsh 3 stars but given the usually excellent standard I can't help but compare it to its predecessors.

Difficult to believe
Losing You starts well, with the non-appearance - rather than disappearance - of the heroine's teenage daughter, after she's been at a sleepover with friends. The mother immediately suspects the worst, which isn't unreasonable considering that the family were due to fly off for a Christmas break in the sun that very morning. However, no one else on the island appears to take the fact that the girl is missing very seriously. At first, this is understandandable, but even when police are called in from the mainland, they are totally inept. This is why the book is so difficult to believe in, because everyone apart from the heroine - who is the narrator for the entire book, thus preventing us from getting to know the other characters well, because she doesn't know them well - is utterly useless. As a result, the mother becomes some kind of super-charged, comic-strip heroine. She does all the detective work, she interviews everyone despite the police trying to stop her, she walks out of the police station where she's gone to help the police and sets off on a ridiculous single-handed hunt, and no one lifts a finger to help her. Even the discovery of the body of another teenage girl doesn't make any difference to the police or the local people. The end, as another reviewer has commented, is absurd. I have no idea why the person responsible for what happened did what they did, and I don't understand how the mother was physically capable of doing what she did. As for the last few pages, when she refuses - as usual - to obey orders even from hospital doctors and nurses, they made me laugh out loud. The concept was a good one, but the book needed some firm editing before publication. If this had been written by a new writer, I don't think it would ever have seen the light of day.

Breathtaking!
Like the other reviewers I think the end felt a bit hurried and not fully explained. However, you can't deny that this is a real page turner in the true sense of the word. The action starts at 10.30 one morning and ends at 6pm that evening which was about as long as it took me to read the book. There are no chapters so all the while the story is gathering pace and I really felt the panic experienced by Nina, our narrator. It is a minute by minute account of the day that Nina's daughter disappears and I felt her distress every second along the way. I would definitely recommend this book.