Two young sisters enjoy an idyllic childhood, until one of them is snatched and the family’s world falls apart in Dandy Smith’s psychological thriller The Wrong Daughter, which sets out to grab the reader from the very first page.
Olivia is 13, and is proud to have been left in charge while her parents go out for the evening. She and her 10-year-old sister Caitlin are close and Olivia plans an illicit picnic for them both in a wildflower meadow near where they live in sleepy Stonemill in Somerset. It’s the perfect end to the day and the pair head home, happy and ready for bed. A few hours later, only one of them is left.
Caitlin wakes with a start and instinctively knows something is wrong – and then she sees a tall, broad figure in a grotesque Venetian mask stealing her sister away, a knife at Olivia’s throat. Hours later, the returning adults find the little girl hiding under her bedclothes, crying and shaking. Olivia is gone, and her disappearance remains a mystery as time passes.
Move on 16 years, and Caitlin is a primary school teacher in Bath. She is engaged to Oscar but won’t commit to a wedding date, remains probably too close to her parents, and her best friend is Florence – who was once best friend to Olivia. In the intervening years since her sister vanished, Caitlin has tried desperately to fill the space left by Olivia, putting her own ambitions and dreams to one side in the hope of pleasing her parents.
Then she receives a frenzied call from her parents – Olivia is home! Caitlin is understandably sceptical about the new arrival, but she looks like Olivia, talks like Olivia and her mother and father are convinced that their missing daughter has come back into the fold. Caitlin’s nagging doubts won’t go away, and after an inconclusive DNA test and the fact that her ‘sister’ doesn’t recall things that she really should, Caitlin is sure that the woman who claims to be Olivia is a fraud.
As she tries to convince others about her theory, Caitlin has the feeling she’s being watched – and when she catches a glimpse of a tall, broad, mask-wearing figure out of the corner of her eye, her life goes into freefall. Is she going mad?
So far, Dandy Smith has teed up a vaguely familiar scenario – it all sounds like something we’ve read before, right? Well, yes – but fasten your seat belts, because this author is anything but run-of-the-mill and what ensues is wholly her own take on a well-worn trope, offering a new spin that will have you spinning too.
To explain more would spoil the reading fun – but just be warned: this book has more twists than a corkscrew and you won’t see most of them coming. In the process, Smith does stretch the laws of probability to near-breaking point, but if you’re prepared to let that pass The Wrong Daughter is an entertaining addition to the bookshelf. It moves along at pace, with a character-driven narrative that will leave you gasping in shock, exasperation, or a mixture of the two.
Characters are multi-layered and by turns loveable and strangely off kilter, which serves to rattle the reading foundations and keep the pages a-turning. Keep going, because this is a read that keeps on giving.
Dandy Smith is a new author to me, but on this showing I will definitely be keeping an eye out for her in future. Fans of Rachel Abbott, Nicci French and Carol Wyer will lap this one up.
Read our interview with the author here.
Embla Books
Print/Kindle/iBook
£5.50
CFL Rating: 4 Stars
