Books Read: She's Not There by Joy Fielding

'I think my real name is Samantha. I think I'm your daughter.'

When Caroline Shipley's two-year-old daughter disappeared, her whole world came crashing down.

Now, fifteen years later, Caroline receives a phone-call that could change everything.

But could this stranger really be her daughter? And what happened all those years ago to make her vanish without a trace? As Caroline pieces together the events of that ill-fated holiday, she begins to question whether the answers could lie dangerously close to home...

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I'd like to thank Emily at Bonnier Zaffre for inviting me to be a part of this blog tour and for my copy of She's Not There to review which I received via NetGalley.

Books featuring missing children seem to the topic of choice at the moment and is very much the central theme in this story which revolves around a young toddler Samantha being abducted from a hotel room whilst her parents, Hunter and Caroline, were out having an anniversary dinner nearby with friends.

Told mainly from the viewpoint of Caroline, the story flips back and forth between the time of the holiday and abduction, the intervening years to the current date, as events unfold and we learn how the relationships suffered, particularly that of Caroline and her now ex-husband and her twenty-year-old daughter Michelle, and friendships strained following that fateful night fifteen years ago.  But what really did happen to Samantha?

Reading this book felt so realistic and so similar to a well-known case here in the UK but, whereas we still don't know what really happened to that child, in She's Not There we do get to a dramatic conclusion that I totally didn't see coming.  From about the 150 page mark I literally could not put my Kindle down until I'd reached the dramatic conclusion of this story and the truth was finally revealed and who was involved.  I thought the story was heading in one direction but then it took me in a totally different jaw-dropping direction which is testament to the writing skills of the author.

Joy Fielding was a new author to me but having had a look on Amazon I can see she has quite a back catalogue so it looks like my TBR pile is going to be added to over the next couple of years.