The Blurb:

“Abbie Devereaux wakes in the dark. She is hooded and bound, with no idea where she is or how she got there. Kept alive by a man she never sees, his only promise is that eventually he will kill her – like the others. But Abbie has spirit and bloody-mindedness on her side. She counts the seconds spent alone and plots her survival. Above all she dreams of returning to normal, careless, everyday life – the land of the living. Grasping at memories, Abbie recalls snatches of her identity, her career, and her disintegrating relationship with her boyfriend. Is there a connection between her real life and the voice in the darkness? And how can she survive in a place where fear becomes madness and the effort to survive seems too much to bear?”

  What I thought:

I love a good crime book! I love the page-turning suspense and what-will-happen-next-ness of them. This was definitely a page-turner but with a healthy dose of cries of “oh purlease!” Let me explain:

The book opens with Abbie Devereux trussed up in the dark in her own filth and hooded so that she can never see the face of her captor. The opening chapters has real hold-your-breath moments and Abbie’s fear is palpable. Then she escapes (no spoiler here, the title sort of gives that away too) and she returns to the land of the living. It’s what happens next that had me scratching my head.

Abbie is questioned by the police and and psychologists and after a few weeks (despite rope marks round her wrists and neck and her obvious trauma) they decide that she has dreamt the whole thing. Yes, imagined it! It turns out that Abbie has been in an abusive relationship and the psycholgist thinks that her brain has twisted the events into something else. So they let her go….out into the big wide world….on her own….despite her having lost her memory for about a week before she went missing, despite her telling them that she was going to be killed by a madman who will surely come looking for her. Are you seeing my problem with this?

So, off Abbie goes to try and trace her movements of the last few days leading up to her kidnap…on her own. I don’t really want to spoil the book by saying too much more but basically Abbie sets off on a trail of her missing memory and trying to track down her captor.

The book is good, has plenty of tension and surprises but I just can’t quite get past the incredulity of the police letting her go and then this traumatised kidnap victim racing all over London….on her own….in an effort the find her memory and her captor. Have you ever seen a film where the character walks into a dark cellar or something and you’re yelling at the TV “Don’t go in there! Are you stupid?????” Well, it sort of feels like that at one point (but it does keep you reading which I suppose is the point).

So, to summarise, I really enjoyed this book: I love a bit of suspense and grit and this doesn’t fail on those counts. I still can’t quite get my head around some of the actions taken but then it would have been a much duller book if the police had believed her!

Have you read any Nicci French? This is my second book by her and I will be on the lookout for more.