Review: After Anna by Alex Lake

The real nightmare starts when her daughter is returned…
A bone-chilling psychological thriller that will suit fans of Daughter, by Jane Shemilt, and The Girl on the Train, by Paula Hawkins.
A girl is missing. Five years old, taken from outside her school. She has vanished, traceless.
The police are at a loss; her parents are beyond grief. Their daughter is lost forever, perhaps dead, perhaps enslaved.
But the biggest mystery is yet to come: one week after she was abducted, their daughter is returned.
She has no memory of where she has been. And this, for her mother, is just the beginning of the nightmare.

Shona's review 4 of 5 stars

I'm not really sure where to start with this one. I'll be honest and admit that I didn't read the blurb properly, so I spent the first half of the book expecting Anna's abductor to kill her... So obviously I was more than relieved when that didn't happen,. But then poor Julia, who thought she had been through the worst of it whilst Anna was missing, was to find out that things could get worse. A lot worse.

I had my suspicions from the very beginning, it felt to me like there was something that should have been said/stated that was ignored, or forgotten in the panic that followed Anna's disappearance, something that could have led the police directly to the abductor almost immediately, something that wasn't even mentioned again until right near the end of the book. This meant that for a large portion of the book I was sure I knew who stole Anna away. And while I may not have gotten the OMG! factor that others may get when reading this, I still found the book highly enjoyable.

It's hard to say you enjoyed a book about a young child being abducted, it feels so very wrong... but the way Lake portrays Julia's story makes this incredible. We see the inner turmoil that Julia faces, the anguish she suffers, but we also see that blind hatred that is generated from members of the public, the onslaught of abuse on twitter and in the news that is oh so very realistic.. It all adds up to a well rounded, suspenseful story that will have you second guessing everyone and their intentions.