The Doctor's Child (The Doctor's Wife #4) by Daniel Hurst
Genre: Psychological thriller, Suspense
Read: 30th April 2024
Goodreads
Amazon
Published: 1st May 2024
★★★★★ 4.5 stars (rounded up)
DESCRIPTION:
The doctor is dead. Now his daughter wants revenge…
‘I’ll always protect you.’ These are the words my mother whispered to me every time she kissed me goodnight. And whenever we ventured outside our windswept seaside village, she’d clutch my hand tightly and her face would be pinched and pale. I never understood why. But now I do.
Growing up, I’d heard the whispers and the rumours. My mother tried to keep the truth from me, but she failed. I understand exactly what happened eighteen years ago. I know I am the murdered doctor’s child.
Everything could have been so different if the doctor’s wife hadn’t ruined my mother’s life – and mine too. We could’ve been a proper family, living in a big house with a stunning sea view. Instead, I never got to know my dad and my mother is a shadow of the person she once was, always looking over her shoulder…
Glancing at my fair hair and bright blue eyes in the mirror, I realise I’m just like my father. And it’s up to me to right the wrongs of the past.
They say the doctor’s wife is clever and calculating. That she gets away with murder. But she hasn’t met me yet…
From the number one bestselling author of The Doctor’s Wife, this is a totally gripping and page-turning psychological thriller that will keep you guessing until the final jaw-dropping twist. If you love Behind Closed Doors, Gone Girl and The Housemaid, you’ll be hooked on The Doctor’s Child.
MY THOUGHTS:
The past can't stay hidden forever...the truth will always come out...
He's back! This time with the fourth and final book in The Doctor's Wife series, concluding the tale that has spanned some two decades. When we left off in the previous book
"The Doctor's Mistress", Alice had been hell-bent on seeing Fern behind bars once and for all whilst battling her post natal depression after Evelyn's birth. But that chapter ended somewhat surprisingly when Alice let Fern go after saving her little girl's life on a Cornwall clifftop. And now they are all back...and Evelyn and Cecilia are now on the cusp on adulthood. So how does it all end?
It's been eighteen years since Alice and Fern were last face to face. Now their daughters have grown and life hasn't quite turned out the way they may have expected it to. For Fern, life on the run has been fraught with danger and looking over her shoulder but her life took a surprising turn when she fell in love with Pierre, a doctor no less, and the couple married in a small and private ceremony in the little French village in which they lived. Her life has been quiet and near perfect but she is forever keeping watch to ensure her secrets stay buried and that her husband and daughter never find out the truth.
But now Cecilia is about to turn 18 and is moving to Paris with her best friend Antoinette where the girls will live their best lives. Fern worries her daughter may be tempted to travel further afield and venture back to England and seek out her roots but Fern must do everything to ensure she never does that for fear that the truth will out.
While life has been kind to her arch enemy since their face-off eighteen years before, Alice has not been so lucky. Her daughter Evelyn has grown up with constant bullying over being the infamous doctor's child as everyone in Arberness knows who they are and their roles in the most famous story to happen in the northern village. Alice never hid the truth from her daughter and now Evelyn is making her mother pay for letting Fern go all those years ago. She cannot understand why she did and has never forgiven her for it. In the meantime, the man at the centre of where it all began - Doctor Drew Devlin - has risen in status to practically sainthood in his daughter's eyes, though she never knew him. And for that she blames Fern and her mother for letting her get away with it.
Now at 18, Evelyn has plans to travel Europe and cut herself off from her mother and hopefully make some friends along the way. Because life has been incredibly lonely in Arberness with no friends at all, not with everyone knowing exactly who you are. And as the day she leaves arrives, her answers to her mother's questions are monosyllabic at best and her impatience to get away evident.
But Evelyn finds her travels aren't all what she expected to be. She makes no new friends as everyone in the hostels are travelling together and have no need for a third wheel and her desire to seek out new experiences and new friends falls flat. Until she arrives in Paris. There she makes two new friends - Cecilia and Antoinette. And it's only a matter of time before the fireworks begin...
OK so this one was a little more predictable than the previous three and yet it still holds the Hurst factor throughout. It was always going to end some way or another, it was just a matter of when and how. It's like two trains on a collision course. You know what's going to happen and you wait with baited breath to see it play out in slow motion as the two collide, unable to stop it happening. As the reader, we know the full story and we watch as the truth is revealed to the unsuspecting passengers in Cecilia and Evelyn.
It was interesting to see how the two women's lives had played out in the two decades since they last met. Fern was actually likeable now. She'd built a life for herself and Cecilia, which is what Alice told her to do. On the other hand, Alice has had to live with the choice she made in letting Fern go because she saved her little girl that day. But no matter how much she tried explaining it to Evelyn, her daughter refused to understand why. Evelyn looked at what Fern took away from her with rose tinted glasses in that she robbed her of her father, one that was a philandering womaniser who was not a very nice man and who I doubt would have had much interest in a child he'd fathered with his mistress. Evelyn's attitude grated on me throughout and she behaved like a spoilt child in some instances, blaming her mother who had done everything to protect her. Whilst Cecilia, on the other hand, lived a charmed life in France in total oblivion to her own mother's past crimes.
This tale is one of redemption as the story comes full circle with even something of a sad end in the case of one of the characters I had come to love in previous books. I do hope this is the last in the series as I believe the story has gone as far as it could go and really it has come full circle anyway.
THE DOCTOR'S CHILD can be read as a standalone but I do recommend that you read the series in order to appreciate the story in its entirety from the start.
4. The Doctor's Child
Another stellar read from Daniel Hurst, unfolding through the various narratives and timelines to paint a fuller picture for the reader as only Hurst does.
I would like to thank #DanielHurst, #Netgalley and #Bookouture for an ARC of #TheDoctorsChild in exchange for an honest review.
MEET THE AUTHOR:
Daniel Hurst was born in the northwest of England, a part of the world famous for its comedians, pasties and terrible weather.
He has been employed in several glamorous roles in his lifetime, including bartending, shelf stacking and procurement administration, all while based in some of the most exotic places on the planet, like Bolton, Preston and South London.
Daniel writes psychological thrillers and loves to tell tales about unusual things happening to normal people. He has written all his life, making the progression from handing scribbled stories to his parents as a boy to writing full length novels in his thirties. He lives in the North West of England and when he isn’t writing, he is usually watching a game of football in a pub where his wife can’t find him.
Since following his lifelong passion for writing in 2020, he has amassed a loyal and devoted set of readers, and regularly has several books in the top 100 of the Psychological Thriller Charts on Amazon. His title The Passenger became the #1 selling psychological thriller in the UK in October 2021. The Doctor's Wife is his first publication with Bookouture.
A prolific writer, Daniel likes to keep readers on their toes by self publishing even more books in between those released through his publisher.
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