The Daughter

By: Jane Shemilt

Narrated by: Sophie Aldred

Jenny is a successful family doctor, the mother of three great teenagers, married to a celebrated neurosurgeon. But when her youngest child, 15-year-old Naomi, doesn't come home after her school play, Jenny's seemingly ideal life begins to crumble. The authorities launch a nationwide search with no success. Naomi has vanished, and her family is broken.

As the months pass, the worst-case scenarios - kidnapping, murder - seem less plausible. The trail has gone cold. Yet for a desperate Jenny, the search has barely begun. More than a year after her daughter's disappearance, she's still digging for answers - and what she finds disturbs her. Everyone she's trusted, everyone she thought she knew, has been keeping secrets, especially Naomi.

Piecing together the traces her daughter left behind, Jenny discovers a very different Naomi from the girl she thought she'd raised.

©2014 Jane Shemilt (P)2015 Tantor

Critic reviews

"Shemilt injects a great deal of suspense into her narrative in both time frames even as her fluid prose eloquently captures a mother's grief and painful journey to self-awareness." ( Booklist)

It's was ok

The book was good but very long for to me a disappointing ending and left it on the hinge which I don't like I like closure

The slowest burn

It took an exorbitant amount of time to get to the meat and potatoes of this story. Overall, I did not care for the story, or the characters but not because the writing was bad. This was a recommended book for me that I will not pass on. It just was sad.

NOT A MYSTERY NOVEL

This book is not a mystery story by any means. It is a good, but not great, tale of what a well-meaning "perfect" mother learns about herself and her perfect family as the hours, days, weeks, and months pass after her young daughter goes missing. Very slow in some places.

I gave up on this one...

I rarely ever give up on a book once I’m at least half way into it.

This one just lost me. It seemed to move very slowly and I just completely lost interest. I decided to read other reviews and when I read over and over how readers were frustrated and disappointed with the ending; I gave up and moved on to a new book.

Kept you reading!

Great book! Loved the ending! Beautifully written drew you in and you felt the pain, despair and determination