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Summary
Summary
It's Nina Landry's birthday, and she's supposed to have her kids ready to leave in a few hours for a Christmas holiday in Florida with her new boyfriend, but her fifteen-year-old daughter Charlie spent the night at a friend's and hasn't come home yet. Not by ten a.m., not by eleven. Nina is getting angry---they have a plane to catch, and Charlie hasn't even bothered to pack. As time passes, though slower and slower by the minute, Nina becomes uneasy. Her anger gives way to worry, and that worry quickly builds into panic.
By one p.m., she's wondering, has Charlie run away, or has something far worse happened? And why won't anyone---not the cops, not Charlie's friends, not Charlie's father---take her disappearance seriously?
As day turns to night on their home of Sandling Island sixty miles from London, and a series of ominous secrets leads Nina from sickening suspicion to deadly certainty, the question becomes less whether she and her daughter will leave the island in time and more whether they'll ever leave it again.
In Losing You , the newest thriller from the long-acclaimed master of psychological suspense, Nicci French unravels one mother's life and replaces it with every mother's worst nightmare.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
A mother fights to keep her composure as she hunts for her missing child in this nuanced, literate thriller from the husband-wife writing team of Nicci Gerrard and Sean French (Killing Me Softly). Shortly before Christmas, Nina Landry, a divorced mother of two living on isolated Sandling Island somewhere in the south of England, is getting ready for a family vacation in Florida that will include her new marine biologist boyfriend. Blindsided by a surprise 40th birthday party, Nina is further disconcerted when her 15-year-old daughter, Charlie, who was supposed to help with the packing, fails to come home from a slumber party. Nina's seamless first-person account of the next 24 hours mines the frustration and feelings of helplessness that come with any investigation slowed by the rigmarole of police work. This engrossing read captures the importance of the often overlooked and underappreciated minutiae of everyday life while commanding a deeply personal reaction in readers. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A desperate mom tracks a missing child in another of French's spellbinders (Catch Me When I Fall, 2006, etc.). It's getaway time for Nina Landry and her brood--two children plus Christian, her lover. What they're getting away from is bleak Sandling Island, 60 miles from London, and the "pinched, icy days of English winter." They're bound for a Christmas holiday in Florida, but now there's a hitch. What happened to Charlie? She is Nina's 15-year-old daughter, headstrong, unpredictable, an adolescent's adolescent. She'd been at a sleepover, a party that had, in a blink, gone from acceptably decorous to wildly hormonal, and from which she vanished. When Nina calls the police, a well-meaning constable attempts to reassure. She'll turn up. " 'Teenagers have secrets,' " he explains. He's right, of course, and over the next several hours, he's repeatedly, chillingly, corroborated as Nina delves as deeply as she can into Charlie's personal life. But Charlie does not turn up. While her whereabouts remain shrouded in mystery, her friends profess to be clueless, the police continue to comfort and, in Nina's view, underperform deplorably. No choice then but for Nina to pick up the slack, since it's clear to her, at least, that something terrible has happened, that the clock is not her friend and that she herself constitutes Charlie's best chance. Strong, resourceful and, yes, scared silly, she knocks on doors, experiences the unkindness of certain strangers--whose detachment amounts to cruelty--but at last uncovers something that matters, something frightening, true, but revealing: Charlie's abandoned bike. The police become serious now, even more so when suddenly forced to confront the possibility that Charlie's disappearance might be linked to an earlier disappearance--another missing teenager, a friend of Charlie's, found murdered. Though one or two plotlines remain dangling at the end, oh how the story grabs. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
When Nina Landry moves with her family from London to tranquil Sandling Island, she envisions peace and contentment. But not long after relocating, she finds herself divorced. Then, on the morning when Nina, her new boyfriend, and Nina's 15-year-old daughter, Charlie, are slated to leave on holiday, Charlie goes missing. Although Charlie has always been a bit rebellious, her mother senses that this time something really is awry. Nina's sense of panic grows as she retraces the latest events in Charlie's life (the sleepover at a friend's house, the paper route she never finished). The police are nonchalant about the young girl's disappearance; only when her abandoned bicycle is found do they step up the search. French, the pseudonym for married journalists Nicci Gerard and Sean French, renders psychological chillers that manage to generate great suspense despite a few too many melodramatic flourishes. This latest offering (after Catch Me When I Fall, in 2007) is sure to keep readers furiously flipping pages through the night.--Block, Allison Copyright 2007 Booklist