Losing You

Easily the best read I've had in ages. This is fast moving thriller and it is simply not possible to put the book down. The plot is built on every mother's worst fear-abduction of their daughter. The story is about the mother's frantic search around the island to find her daughter and the indifferent attitude of the police. On her journey she learns that she doesn't know her daughter as well as she thought she did.

Where's the final chapter? (2/3 people found this helpful)

I'm not being funny with my title - I really did expect one more chapter at the end that would have more of an explanation of what happened. I hadn't read any of these reviews before buying this book or I guess I would've expected an incomplete ending.

I bought it because I love Nicci French and assumed that this would be another great read and in a way it was. I was drawn into the plot and kept on reading (hard to stop as you can't say 'just one from chapter then I'll get back to work' if there aren't any chapters) and was racing my way through the book desperate to know what happened: who had taken Charlie and why? Well, towards the end of the book, one of those questions got answered (who) but not the other and that was a major disappointment. I genuinely thought that there was one more chapter to go in which 'all would be revealed' but that turned out to the be first chapter of the new Nicci French book. I was so disgruntled that I didn't even bother to read that either whereas I would usually be really keen to see what the next book was like. What I actually did was come straight to Amazon have a look and see what other people through and was reassured that it wasn't just me that thought there was no depth to the answer to the 'why' question. It seemed to me as if the guilty party's response was out of all proportion to the supposed trigger event and also that event and the response was entirely out of character for that person or what we knew of them from the little character development that there was in the book. If there had been more put into developing the characters and their situations, perhaps the reason for this person's action would have made sense but with the little that we knew about this person then it was hard to see why they did what they did. I do understand that telling the story from a single perspective means that we can only know what that person knows about other people and that is fine but it does create problems if there is no full explanation at the end as we are just left wondering - why, why why!!

To be fair and balanced, there were really good things about this book. I got really caught up with the 'real time' approach and it did a good job in building up the tension. I disagree with some of the reviewers who said that the mother's response to her daughter being missing was unrealistic: I think that someone in her position would do exactly what she did which is to race around following every possible avenue for finding her daughter even if some of them were not sensible lines of investigation. Sure, she had some 'lucky' bursts of intuition but she did follow up a whole host of red herrings too. And I think that the slow, measured approach of the police was realistic: this was a 16yo girl that went missing, not a 6yo. What I found as wholly realistic was that all these people would flood round for this so-called birthday party when it was clear elsewhere in the book that the central character did not really know many of her neighbours at all. Why did they all go round to her house for a party when they didn't know her? Clearly, the party played a role in the story but it could have been handled in a less clumsy way.

I think that one of the other reviewers hit the nail on the head by saying that this feels like a speedy production written to fulfil contractual requirements. If it had been tidied up a bit and finished properly, this would have been a great read. As it was, it was a potentially great and very frustrating read. I hope that the next one is better.

A few problems mar an exciting thriller (1/1 people found this helpful)

The writing duo Nicci Gerrard and Sean French have made a name for themselves with their well-written, intelligent psychological thrillers over recent years. 'Losing You' is their ninth novel, and they have attempted something rather different this time. Overall it has proved to be a success, despite a few niggles - how much you enjoy this book largely depends on how easily you can suspend your disbelief.

This novel takes place in 'real time', over the space of about seven hours on a single day, and the text has no chapters and few breaks of any kind which adds to the impression of the reader witnessing events as they happen (although it makes finding a convenient place to stop rather difficult - I ended up reading the whole thing in one go). We start with the central character Nina preparing to depart for a holiday in Florida over Christmas, and her gradual realisation that her teenage daughter has gone missing. The Nicci French books are usually adept at cranking up the tension, and that's certainly the case here, coupled with the frustration of no-one taking Nina's fears seriously. It ends up with Nina herself having to do most of the leg work in the search for her daughter.

This is really the first quibble I have with the book. I'm not a parent myself, but I imagine, like Nina, I would be rushing around doing anything and everything possible to find my child in this sitaution. However, Nina's amazing powers of deduction and persuasion in getting to the bottom of the mystery (while the police plod along without a clue and apparently content to let Nina do their work for them) really do beggar belief at times. The narrative is strong enough to keep the reader's interest, but there are definitely times when you'll find Nina's escapades a little hard to swallow.

The other problem I have with the book is the ending. Although the novel is under 300 pages, I felt that the last 30 or so were absolutely unnecessary. Sarah has her final showdown with the person or persons responsible for her daughter's disapperance, and it's very tense and well written, but then the story rumbles on to another crisis and then yet another and eventually peters out with a dying whimper. I couldn't help being disappointed that the authors felt the need to add this padding rather than let the novel end on a high 30 pages earlier.

Nevertheless, I would still recommend this book to any of Nicci French's regular readers; it's not the authors' best work, but as long as you can suspend your disbelief towards the end, you'll find yourself caught up in Nina's race against time to save her child. I applaud Nicci and Sean for trying something a little different; even if it wasn't an unqualified success, at least they aren't content to sit back and repeat the same old formula - unlike some other crime writers I could mention.

A good start...but thoroughly unbelievable and a dreadful ending! (1/2 people found this helpful)

I have been a fan of Nicci French since their first book, The Memory Game, though there are times when I have been disappointed and unfortunately this is one of them. The story starts well enough, missing girl, panicking mother etc., but then things begin to go off the rails a little - this book gives a terrible impression of British police, that they sit around talking and doing nothing constructive, forcing a missing girl's mother to go off and do their job for them, i.e. searching locations, interviewing witnesses, following suspects etc. I hope it is not really like that! And when I got to the end I thought there was a chapter missing...I was waiting for a twist, or at least a follow up to explain everything, but it just cuts off, leaving a great many loose ends hanging in mid air, leaving me thoroughly dissatisfied - surely the whole point of a thriller is to twist and turn, and, most importantly, give you an explanation at the end of who, what, when, where, and above all HOW and WHY people did what they did etc. This is sadly lacking. So be warned!

Interesting new direction, but idea needs developing (3/3 people found this helpful)

As a Nicci French fan as soon as I could get my hands on this thriller I bought it. These authors write some of my favourite books and always keep me gripped. As an interesting new direction, Losing You is cleverly written in realtime, with no skipping over of details and as a technical way of accompanying the panicky plotline. Set in the first day after her eldest child has gone missing, Losing You portrays the heroine's search for her daughter. It is realistic in the way that while Nina begins her day in a calculated timescale, as the frantic afternoon and evening unravels we lose sense of time as we suspect she must, becoming more and more panicked and running out of time in her search.
However, I think Gerard and French need to refine this way of writing a novel in one long thread, as a single chapter, because it contains the seeds of the novel's own shortcomings. For instance, while at the beginning there is time to get a vague feel of the other characters, the only real development occurs in those of Nina, her son, her ex-husband and the two main neighbours, Alix and Joel. This doesn't give a sense of depth to parts of the novel; for instance, the killer. While in other books we are always given a sense of the killer's character (be they more of a background personality, like Charlie in Catch Me, or Morris in Beneath the Skin, or someone that we know from the beginning is sinister, like Brendan in Secret Smile or Adam in Killing Me Softly), thus enabling us to weigh up the evidence and guess who the killer might be, Losing You's killer could have been anyone as we have no character depth. While Nicci French varies perspectives and this is not their only novel written entirely in the heroine's first person, it feels lacking in that we don't feel part of her. This is also due to the pace of the book, which does not have time to engage us in Nina's life - we don't know what her job is, what she likes or what her hobbies are, who her real friends are - and therefore I felt less gripped than usual. The realtime element also prevents the authors from cutting out the more irrelevent points of the story, which slows a pace that should be racy and tense into something the reader wishes wasn't as slow and descriptive, especially geographically - the road-placings of Charlie's paper round are unnecessary for instance.
The pace at the ending of the book, while initially inducing the tension we are used to, almost becomes annoying - the inept authorities still don't understand what's happened and Nina won't trust the doctors who are there to help, although perhaps understandably she is desperate to see Charlie. While we seem to be promised a characteristic twist at the end, when the police point out the failings of Nina's idea of the killer, the finish falls short of expectations.
At the end of the book I felt short-changed - I had had no idea who the killer was, and in retrospect, didn't 'understand' the motives as I have in previous French novels. The book did not thrill until the last sentence as is usual; in fact it could have concluded a couple of pages earlier. There were thrilling and exciting parts to the novel but, in short, fingers crossed that Until It's Over will be a return to form.

Nicci French

Reader Reviews:

Losing You (0/0 people found this helpful)

Where's the final chapter? (2/3 people found this helpful)

A few problems mar an exciting thriller (1/1 people found this helpful)

A good start...but thoroughly unbelievable and a dreadful ending! (1/2 people found this helpful)

Interesting new direction, but idea needs developing (3/3 people found this helpful)

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