Eight hours of suspense.... (Losing You - Nicci French)

Member Name: sheri3004

Product:	Losing You - Nicci French
Date:	06/03/07 (87 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Builds suspense well, fast-paced

Disadvantages: Thinly plotted, not always believable

It's no secret that Nicci French is a pseudonym for journalists Nicci Gerrard and Sean French, who, as well as writing the "Nicci French" novels together, also happen to be married to each other. Sounds like a recipe for divorce to me, but it clearly works for them - since the publication of their first novel, "The Memory Game" in 1997, they have produced a further eight successful novels, of which "Losing You" is the most recent. Both Nicci and Sean also write separately - Nicci as a journalist for The Observer - and both have also published novels under their own names. (Some of their novels have been adapted for the screen - you may recall the fairly recent "Secret Smile", which starred David Tennant as a baddie so hide-behind-the-sofa scary that it's not at all clear why the makers of Doctor Who needed to bother with Daleks or Cybermen.)

Anyway. It's the eighteenth of December, a week before Christmas. It's also maths teacher Nina Landry's fortieth birthday, and it's also the day she is due to fly off to Florida for a winter break with her two children and new boyfriend. However, events seem to be conspiring against Nina - car trouble, an unwelcome (and, frankly, somewhat unbelievable) surprise birthday party, and the fact that her fifteen-year-old daughter Charlie has yet to return from a sleepover the previous night. This last, initially just a minor irritation - Charlie is not known for her reliability - quickly becomes a cause for panic as her absence continues.

The police aren't much help…. fifteen-year-olds often go missing temporarily, they say, and she's sure to turn up soon. It's not as if she was a young child, after all. In the face of official indifference, an increasingly frantic Nina struggles to find out what has happened to her daughter, retracing Charlie's steps and seeking information and help from Charlie's friends and their parents, her own slightly deranged ex-husband, a discarded lover and his jealous wife, among others.

All the action takes place on Sandling Island, a small community connected to the East Anglian mainland by a causeway. It's one of those places where everybody knows, or at least knows of, everybody else… a safer environment, supposedly, where you can go out without locking your door. The atmosphere and terrain of the island are evoked well, and this is one of the strengths of the book.

Nina's mounting panic, which can be all too easily imagined by anyone who is a parent, is well evoked and the story is told almost in "real time" over the course of a single day - eight hours, in fact - enabling the reader to really get caught up in the events. As the entire story is told from Nina's viewpoint, it is easy to identify with her fear and frustration, her feeling that her daughter is hurt or in danger and she is the only person to take this seriously.

As events unfold, the story builds to a genuinely nerve-shredding - and unanticipated - denouement.

Although "Losing You" is undeniably a gripping read, ultimately I found it a bit disappointing. The plot is paper-thin, with not a word of explanation as to why certain characters behaved in the way they did. (Can't really elaborate on that for fear of spoiling the ending, but if you read it, you'll see what I mean.) The police are almost ridiculously inept, leaving any positive action entirely to Nina. I actually wondered if Gerrard and French were under pressure to deliver this novel, as it feels in many ways rushed and unsatisfying… even the title is hardly original. I may be completely wrong, of course, but that's how it felt to me, and I didn't feel it measured up to the high standards of some of the previous French novels.

Nonetheless, an engrossing read.

Available for £5.99 from Amazon in paperback; 320pp.

Summary: Suspenseful but ultimately a bit disappointing