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Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | MYSTERY LIN | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
With more than fifteen million copies of her novels sold in Europe, Charlotte Link makes her chillingly psychological American debut, now in English for the first time. A suspenseful, atmospheric new psychological crime novel from Germany's most successful living female author.
An old farm, a deserted landscape, a dark secret from times past with fatal consequences for the present.In the tranquil northern seaside town of Scarborough, a student is found cruelly murdered. For months, the investigators are in the dark, until they are faced with a copy-cat crime. The investigation continues, but they are still struggling to establish a connection between the two victims.Ambitious detective Valerie Almond clings too the all too obvious: a rift within the family of the second victim. But there is far more to the case than first appears and Valerie is led towards a dark secret, inextricably linked to the evacuation of children to Scarborough during World War II.Horrified at her last-minute discovery, Valerie realizes that she may be too late for action.
Author Notes
Charlotte Link is one of Europe's bestselling crime writers and has sold more than 15 million novels in Germany alone. Her atmospheric brand of psychological suspense made THE OTHER CHILD a massive No. 1 bestseller in Germany and was greeted by rave reviews. Charlotte has been nominated for the Fiction Category of the German Book Prize and her work has been widely adapted for TV, with the adaptation of THE OTHER CHILD set for transmission in Germany in 2011.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Link, a bestseller in her native Germany, makes her U.S. debut with a sophisticated and thoughtful mystery set in England. After an ominous prologue, in which a woman stumbles across an unnamed secret on a remote farm in Yorkshire in 1970, the action shifts to 2008 in the same area. College student Amy Mills leaves a babysitting gig late at night to travel home, only to find her regular, relatively safe route blocked off, which proves to be a prelude to her brutal killing. Both incidents recede into the background as Link presents a large cast of characters drawn together by the engagement of Gwen Beckett, a wallflower whose fiance is viewed as only being after the farm she's due to inherit. More death follows, with the motive possibly linked to Gwen's father's disturbing past and the tragic fallout from the evacuation of children from London during the Blitz. Fans of Ruth Rendell and Minette Walters will be enthralled. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Most readers would never guess that this gripping psychological thriller, set in a small English village, is the work of a best-selling German novelist. Link's English-language debut is a dark, disturbing novel of suspense on par with those of Minette Walters. Wallflower Gwen Beckett's engagement party should have been as quiet as the bride-to-be. But her father's old friend Fiona Barnes can't hold her tongue and accuses Gwen's fiancee of using Gwen to escape his own lackluster life and inherit the Becketts' land. Later that night, Fiona is murdered. The crime bears similarities to the recent murder of a young college student. Could the two women have anything in common? Or could the murder be related to e-mails Fiona had recently written to Gwen's father, breaking the silence about what happened between them during the war? The passages describing Gwen's time at the Becketts' farm during the Blitz introduce us to the other child referenced in the title a damaged orphan who attaches himself to Fiona on the train ride to Yorkshire and accompanies her to the Becketts. Link builds a sense of menace in these chapters that makes readers dread turning the page but keeps them up all night doing just that.--Keefe, Karen Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Charlotte Link, a best-selling author in her native Germany but previously unknown to American readers, has the eerie insight peculiar to writers of psychological suspense. While most of us look at our neighbors and see ordinary people living humdrum lives, they see something dark and menacing beneath the surface. The story of THE OTHER CHILD (Pegasus Crime, $25.95) is all the more unnerving because certain chapters are told from the perspective of Fiona Swales, who was one of the children evacuated to the English countryside in 1940 during the London blitz. Fiona and another child, an orphan who attaches himself to her during the train journey, are taken in by kindly Emma Beckett and brought back to the family farm to live with her own teenage son, Chad. Although a city girl, Fiona falls instantly in love with the "endless fields" and "dreamy little villages" of the Yorkshire coast and returns to the farm when her widowed mother remarries. It's in Yorkshire that we catch up with Fiona in 2008, living in Scarborough and a frequent visitor to the farm, where her dear friend Chad has done a terrible job of raising his daughter, Gwen, a plain, old-fashioned, "elderly girl" in her mid-30s who is about to make the mistake of her life by marrying a handsome and financially desperate fortune hunter. Fiona's meddlesome intervention upsets the wedding plans, which are further complicated by two seemingly unrelated murders. Every well-built psychological suspense narrative involves a thorough, methodical dissection of characters we've been led to believe we already know. It's a delicate skill, and authors like Ruth Rendell have made it into something of an art form. In this translation by Stefan Tobler, Link demonstrates the same subtle touch, keeping the reader's eye trained on Fiona and the guilty secret she shares with Chad, while distracting us from the innocent-looking characters standing quietly in the shadows. Or have I already said too much? For want of a better term, Peter Lovesey's novels about Peter Diamond, the chief of detectives in the historic English city of Bath, are designated as police procedurals. But these erudite and wondrously witty books are unlike any police procedural you've ever read. THE TOOTH TATTOO (Soho Crime, $25.95) is a case in point. Of course there's a murder to be solved - a curious one, involving a young Japanese music lover who has come to Bath in hopes of hearing a celebrated string quartet known as the Staccati. But for the most part, the murder investigation provides the structural framework for a group portrait of the eccentric members of this captivating ensemble and the music they play with such rapturous devotion. Lovesey's droll humor is on ample display as the members of Diamond's investigative team poach ideas from "C.S.I." and tease their gloomy chief for behaving like the depressive Scandinavian policemen in popular fiction. (There are also inside jokes for the musically minded, like the one about Odessa being the source of all the world's great string players.) Even the murder investigation is fun, in its own peculiar way; but for death-defying thrills, nothing quite compares to the Staccati swinging into Beethoven's Quartet in C sharp minor. One of these days, World War II will come to an end, and then how will we manage without Bernie Gunther, the cynical Berlin cop who has somehow contrived to stay alive and retain some vestige of personal integrity in Philip Kerr's harrowing historical thrillers? Bernie is still trapped inside Nazi Germany in A MAN WITHOUT BREATH (Marian Wood/Putnam, $26.95), although in a relatively protected position with the Bureau of War Crimes in the Wehrmacht's legal division. But when a mass grave containing thousands of Polish officers is uncovered in Smolensk, Bernie finds himself back on the Eastern Front, looking for a way to pin the blame for the Katyn massacre on the Russians, which would alienate their Western allies and possibly turn the tide of the war. Meanwhile, he's fresh out of schemes for keeping certain attractive Jewish women and their families out of detention camps. These are the kind of lose / lose situations Kerr loves to toss Bernie into. But as a regular guy living in irregular times, Bernie is even more out of his element among the Prussian aristocrats in Smolensk at a classical music concert. Kerr's sardonic vision always encompasses wry humor, even amid the horrors of war. "We don't have serial killers; we don't have kidnappings; and there aren't many rapists out there attacking women on the streets," Inspector Avraham Avraham patiently explains to an anxious mother who has reported that her 16-year-old son is missing. The conscientious hero of D. A. Mishani's first mystery, THE MISSING FILE (Harper, $25.99), needn't sound so wistful. Young Ofer Sharabi has indeed disappeared, an event that sends shock waves through his modest neighborhood in a suburb of Tel Aviv. But instead of attending to suspicious clues - like the overly helpful neighbor who tutored Ofer in English - Avraham plunges into bitter self-doubt and reproach. Mishani, the crime fiction editor of an Israeli publishing house, clearly knows his field, and in Steven Cohen's smooth translation he delivers a solid brainteaser. But a more satisfying way to read this mystery is to take it for what it really is - a thoughtful character study of a good man deeply troubled by issues of innocence and guilt. Most of us look at our neighbors and see ordinary people; writers like Charlotte Link see something darker.
Kirkus Review
Although she's well-known in Germany, this book marks Link's first real entry into the American market. When plain, uninteresting Gwen Beckett becomes engaged to a handsome and accomplished man with little means, an old family friend, Fiona Barnes, smells a rat. Worse, the elderly Fiona isn't shy about saying what she thinks, and by doing so, she opens a floodgate of startling developments that take place both in wartime London and on the Beckett farm located in the Yorkshire countryside. First, there's the terrible murder of a young university student who is killed by an unknown assailant following a baby-sitting job. Then, following Gwen's engagement party, things become even more dangerous, as the killer, or a copycat, strikes again. DI Valerie Almond is brought in to solve the crime, and she races to catch the murderer or murderers before he or she strikes once more. The back story of what happened to the other child in the title--a little boy whose family died in the London air raids and ended up mistakenly accompanying Fiona to the Beckett farm during World War II--is compelling and offers a fascinating look at English rural life during the war. Fiona, painted as an unlikable and selfish woman, tells the story of the other child, Brian, and her feelings about him through a series of long email letters that Gwen finds. Rich with interesting characters and a plot that only becomes a little repetitive at the end, this is a solid tale that will keep readers guessing at the identity of the killer or killers. But some readers may be put off by the way Link's characters always choose to do the wrong thing. And for those who prefer an interesting, well-developed police investigator, Almond is a disappointment--dull, one-dimensional and not very competent. A compelling story, but the cop on the case isn't likely to garner fans with her approach to crime solving.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
After reading only a few pages of Link's U.S debut, a best seller in Germany, it is easy to see why she is the most successful female crime author in her home country. When two murders occur in the small English village of Scarborough, the second one a copycat killing that takes place months after the first, Det. Valerie Almond is at a loss. Then she learns that the murders may be connected to the evacuation of children from the area during World War II. Fiona Barnes was a young teen during that time and writes letters to a close friend detailing the tragic story of "the other child." Exactly who is the "other child" and what does this child from the past have to do with the present-day murders? VERDICT This phenomenal, multilayered mystery offers plenty of psychological intrigue and suspense. Skillfully juggling the two stories, Link sets a fast pace and weaves in characters who are both tragic and ones readers can relate to. Fans of psychological thrillers and dark mysteries will love this engrossing novel.-Amy M. Davis, Parmley Billings Lib., MT (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
