NO ONE CAN HEAR YOU by Nikki Crutchley @NikkiCAuthor

4 out of 5 stars

On Amazon UK
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How I discovered this book: it was submitted to Rosie's Book Review Team, of which I am a member.

Genre: Crime and abduction, set in New Zealand

The book opens with an excellent prologue about Faith, a teenage foster kid getting abducted, back in 2001.  It then goes back to the main story, about Zoe, a thirty-something, recently unemployed teacher whose life is all at sea, going back to small town Crawton because her mother has died.  Zoe's feelings about this can hardly even be called 'mixed' ~ her relationship with Lilian was cold and distant, and she hasn't seen her since she was eighteen.  When she arrives in Crawton, though, she is left wondering what really happened to her mother.

Meanwhile, meth-head Megan has been abducted, and is kept prisoner in a storage cupboard.

Despite the themes of abduction, murder and the sleazy underworld of drugs, I'd describe this as a low-key thriller; much of the novel concerns Zoe's relationship with her mother and the other issues she is working through, and there is quite a lot of domestic and day-to-day conversational detail, which, together with the writing style, lends itself more to a dark drama with gradually unfolding sinister developments than edge-of-your-seat suspense.  It's nicely written and the characterisation is good, particularly Faith, with whom the book opens.  One of the characters has Alzheimer's, and I thought this was most realistic.

I had a feeling who the baddie(s) might be about half way through, but that's probably because I watch a lot of TV of this genre; it's not at all obvious.  The plot is convincing and cleverly structured, I thought the descriptions of what the abducted girls went through was particularly well done, and the ending was good ~ I do appreciate a well-thought out ending.  I can imagine this being the sort of book you might get into reading on holiday.