Welcome to my review of The Daughters by Julia Crouch Book Review. I saw this advertised and it gripped me immediately. It has a great premise and I thought I would really enjoy it.
My father said my mother killed herself. My sister says he’s lying.
The day of our mother’s funeral, my little sister Lucy and I clung to our father’s side. He promised he’d get us through it, and we believed him. But then I discovered that the coffin we wept over was empty.
Dad says he was trying to protect us – that he thought it would be easier to grieve if we didn’t know our mother’s body was never found.
His new wife says she just wants to help us move on from the past.
Then Lucy has a flash of memory that leaves her shaking. Our father. A woman she doesn’t recognise. A knife…
She insists she knows something about the day our mother died, but it’s buried too deep to see clearly.
What happened to our mother? I need to find the truth. But I have no idea who I can trust. And what if the answer puts my life in danger?
A completely gripping psychological thriller that will make your heart pound as you try to decide who is telling the truth. Perfect for fans of Lisa Jewell, Paula Hawkins and Gillian Flynn.
Julia Crouch spent ten years working in theatre, then, after a spell of teaching, she somehow became a graphic and website designer, a career she followed for another decade while raising her three children. An MA in sequential illustration re-awoke her love of story-telling and a couple of Open University creative writing courses brought it to the fore.
Cuckoo, her first novel, emerged as a very rough draft during NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) in 2008. A year’s editing got it ready for submission to an agent and within a couple of months she had a book deal with Headline and had given up the day job.
Every Vow You Break, her second novel, was published in March 2012, Tarnished, her third, came out in 2013, followed by Every Vow You Break in 2014, Her Husband’s Lover in 2017 and The New Mother in 2021. She is also published in Italy, France, Germany, Holland, Brazil, China and Ukraine.
Unable to find a sub-genre of crime writing that neatly described her work, she came up with the term Domestic Noir, which is now widely accepted as the label for one of the most popular crime genres today. She has even written a foreword to a book of academic essays on the subject.
She works in a shed at the bottom of the Brighton house she shares with her husband, the actor and playwright Tim Crouch, their three children, two cats called Keith and Sandra, a dog called Uncle, and about twelve guitars (you can find #Keith, who has his own hashtag, on twitter). She is a self-confessed geek and fights a daily battle to resist tinkering with the code on her website, which can be found at www.juliacrouch.co.uk.
There are secrets and lie in abundance in The Daughters. Carys marries Bill after his first wife, Alice, apparently commits suicide. She takes on their daughters Sara, who is just five years younger, and Lucy as her own, but Sara moves away to Australia as soon as she can.
Lucy was only six when her mother died and subsequently grew up with several mental health issues. We first meet her properly when Carys finds her in her flat after a possible suicide attempt of her own. Carys meets someone while out walking the dog. He specialises in Lucy’s issues and unconventionally treats them as a specialist hypnotherapist. She thinks this is the perfect solution and gets Lucy booked in.
Carys is the perfect helicopter parent. She likes to be around Lucy and seems understandably, entirely pushed out when Sara returns after ten years and takes over. Sara resents Carys, so this is the perfect solution for her. However, she has found out that their mother may not have died as they thought and wants to investigate more, so she has taken a six-month sabbatical from her role as a police officer to return home and discover the truth.
Lucy gets on well with the hypnotherapist but begins to discover memories about events she has witnessed. Whether these are the truth or events the hypnotherapist has suggested to her is unclear, but the police are very interested in any case and investigate her claims. Sara stands by Lucy, but Carys isn’t so sure, especially when it directly affects her own perfect life.
I struggled to get into this book a lot, and it took me a long while. It wasn’t dreadful, just perhaps not the one for me at that time. I persisted and enjoyed the ending. I liked that the characters each had their own secrets they were trying to keep from the others. The escalation of events and the twists and red herrings towards the end was enjoyable too. I didn’t get on so well with the characters, though. I didn’t find myself rooting for any of them.
The book could have flowed better. The large cast of characters of a similar age didn’t help this, though it was integral to the plot. All loose ends were tied up, but I felt there could have been more detail about some of it. There is a small side plot in this, including the neighbour, which also appears to be a little out of place, it does deal with a potential loose end and works initially, but the conclusion to it was primarily a one-line description which felt a bit vague.
Not one of my favourites but a good premise and some good ideas.
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| Title | The Daughters |
| Author | Julia Crouch |
| Series | N/A |
| Format | eARC |
| Page Count | 329 Pages |
| Genre | Psychological Fiction |
| Publisher | Bookouture |
| Release Date | 26th May 2022 |
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