Jesse and Sandra are divorced, with an eight-year-old daughter, Isa, who lives with her mother but has regular contact with her father. When Jesse calls at the Berlin apartment his ex-wife shares with her new boyfriend, he discovers that she has been murdered and Isa has been kidnapped. Her abductor has left a message, written on the child’s bedroom wall in large, red spidery capitals: “YOU DON’T DESERVE HER”. Who has abducted her, and why? Jesse soon realises that the answers lie in his past but, following an accident when he was thirteen, his memories of the past are almost non-existent, other than frightening fragments which appear in recurring, horrific nightmares. However, he knows that, whatever the strength of his emotional reluctance to do so, he must now confront his past if he is to find and rescue the daughter he adores.
Although Jesse is now a successful paediatrician, his childhood was very disturbed and traumatic. He and Sandra had met when they were both in care in a children’s home in Bavaria, where they had felt an immediate, although not always straightforward, attraction to each other. Life in the children’s home was frequently harsh and brutal and the story switches between the 1980s and 2013, following the same group of characters and gradually exposing the backstory which led to the murder and abduction.
This story is described as “a fast paced and addictive thriller ….” but, for this reader, it didn’t live up to this promise. I found it far too repetitive and, although I did manage to resist the temptation to do so, I feel I could easily have skipped sections without losing much of the sense of the developing plot. In fact, I wasn’t too far into the story before I had a good idea how the plot would develop, with the eventual “twist” coming as no surprise – maybe I have been reading too many books in this genre!
Other than with the delightful Isa, I found it difficult to feel any sense of engagement with any of the characters, all of whom seemed rather one-dimensional and unconvincing. I found myself not caring about what happened to any of them, even though some of their experiences were truly horrific and so should have triggered some sort of an emotional response from me. Also, the areas of Germany in which the story is set are ones I know well and yet I got no real sense of them, other than the difficulties of driving in snowy and icy conditions!
This story has been translated and so it is hard to know whether my difficulties with the style has anything to do with this. Without being able to read the German original this is an impossible question for me to answer, but what I am aware of is that there were several occasions when I found that the flow of the story felt rather laboured, and the syntax rather strange and stilted. There were also numerous typographical errors which should have been corrected at the proof reading stage but, as they remained, were another cause of irritation.
Although Jesse is now a successful paediatrician, his childhood was very disturbed and traumatic. He and Sandra had met when they were both in care in a children’s home in Bavaria, where they had felt an immediate, although not always straightforward, attraction to each other. Life in the children’s home was frequently harsh and brutal and the story switches between the 1980s and 2013, following the same group of characters and gradually exposing the backstory which led to the murder and abduction.
This story is described as “a fast paced and addictive thriller ….” but, for this reader, it didn’t live up to this promise. I found it far too repetitive and, although I did manage to resist the temptation to do so, I feel I could easily have skipped sections without losing much of the sense of the developing plot. In fact, I wasn’t too far into the story before I had a good idea how the plot would develop, with the eventual “twist” coming as no surprise – maybe I have been reading too many books in this genre!
Other than with the delightful Isa, I found it difficult to feel any sense of engagement with any of the characters, all of whom seemed rather one-dimensional and unconvincing. I found myself not caring about what happened to any of them, even though some of their experiences were truly horrific and so should have triggered some sort of an emotional response from me. Also, the areas of Germany in which the story is set are ones I know well and yet I got no real sense of them, other than the difficulties of driving in snowy and icy conditions!
This story has been translated and so it is hard to know whether my difficulties with the style has anything to do with this. Without being able to read the German original this is an impossible question for me to answer, but what I am aware of is that there were several occasions when I found that the flow of the story felt rather laboured, and the syntax rather strange and stilted. There were also numerous typographical errors which should have been corrected at the proof reading stage but, as they remained, were another cause of irritation.