Hide AND SEEK!
KIM FINDS HER LIFE IS A PICTURE NOT SO PERFECT
Athriller ought to hook you in from the very first sentence and this one certainly does that. It begins with a young woman called
Kim Leamy who is taking a break between teaching photography evening classes. A stranger approaches her. He is investigating the disappearance of a little girl, Sammy Went, 28 years earlier from her home in Kentucky and tells Kim he believes she is that girl.
Kim is highly sceptical. She’s had a happy childhood in Melbourne and is absolutely certain her late mother was not the kind of woman who would kidnap a toddler. Besides, she has no memories of a different place and life. But even Kim thinks it is a little odd that there are no photographs of her before the age of two in the carefully maintained family albums. And when DNA testing proves without a doubt that Kim is not who she thought she was, the only thing to do is travel back to the suffocatingly small town of Manson, Kentucky, and solve the mystery of her identity.
This gripping story is told in a then-and-now format. That means the reader experiences the trauma of little Sammy’s disappearance back in 1990 and learns about her family, who are divided by secrets and religious fundamentalism. Plus, we follow Kim to America as she meets her real family and tries to understand how the woman who raised her could have done something so terrible.
Manson is filled with religious zealots who handle venomous snakes as part of their worship and Kim is putting herself at risk by going back there, although she doesn’t know it.
Drama, danger, flawed people, a creepy cult with a charismatic leader, secrets, lies and riddles – it’s all going on in this story. Trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together kept me gripped. And even when I thought I’d cracked it, it turned out I was wrong.
The writing is taut, tense and twisty, and even quite minor characters are carefully fleshed out. It reminded me quite a lot of Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn’s earlier novels, so I’ll be interested to see what this writer comes up with next.