After Anna by Alex Lake
Genre: Psychological Thriller
Read: 26th February 2018
Purchase: Amazon
★★★★ 4 stars
After a slowish start I'm glad I persevered with this one, as it did get better.
The first half of the book concentrates on 5 year old Anna's disappearance...and it is long and drawn out. Especially considering she was only gone for a week. I soon bored of the constant drone between Julia and Brian. So their marriage was over. Get over it. Concentrate on Anna. And then when Anna returns, they can't even keep their acts together for the sake of Anna whilst she settles back into normalcy. The bone of contention between them, and for myself too, was Brian's mother Edna. The epitome of the evil mother-in-law. She was positively awful. Selfish, self-indulgent, arrogant, opinionated, conniving, scheming...just plain rude and bitchy, but in a backstabbing kind of way. She hated anyone "leaving her", as she saw it. She made Brian a weak man and yet loathed him for it. And really more than the first half of the book was the hate-filled bitching between the three of them. Brian was so obviously fuelled by his mother as he couldn't derive a single thought himself and then hurl them at Julia. I thought this was about a missing child, but Anna seemed to be forgotten sometimes.
Then there was the abductor. Not written in the third person or even the first person, but the obscure "you had it all planned", "you executed it perfectly" tone of what....a second person? For me, the identity of the abductor was pretty obvious. I mean, who else could it be? And the lengths to which they went to, well it just seemed obvious. I won't spoil it by saying who though. You may be surprised and not guess it.
Then Anna came home. Unharmed. Without memory of what happened or where she'd been. But she did have snippets of memories. Particularly of an oversized doll's house. And this is where it did begin to get interesting. I read the second half in one sitting, and felt Julia's frustration as well as anger. I found myself uttering "what a bitch" and screaming obscenities in my mind. It was then that the whole story began to make sense...maybe not to Julia just yet, but to the reader. Everything began to add up - Brian's missing father who had "run off" with his girlfriend and not been heard from since; not even the police could find a trace of them. Anna returned unharmed.
There was no real great mystery here, I don't think. But it did get my blood boiling. And it did make for an interesting ending. A satisfactory debut.
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