Book Review: The Hidden Child
The Hidden Child by Camilla Läckberg
Publisher: HighBridge Company
Release Date: May 6, 2014
Narrator: Simon Vance
Length: 15 hours
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Publisher’s Description:
Crime writer Erica Falck is shocked to discover a Nazi medal among boxes in her late mother’s attic. Haunted by a childhood of neglect, she resolves to dig into her family’s past to finally uncover the reasons why.
Her inquiries lead her to the home of a retired history teacher who had been among her mother’s circle of friends during the Second World War, but her questions there are met with bizarre and evasive replies. Two days later the man is brutally murdered in a house he shared with his brother, a Nazi war criminal investigator with the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
Detective Patrik Hedström, Erica’s husband, on paternity leave with their newborn child, soon becomes embroiled in the murder investigation. Who would kill so ruthlessly to bury secrets so old? The answers may lie in Erica’s mother’s wartime diaries, but can they find them before dark secrets from over sixty years ago surface to destroy them all?
The Hidden Child is the fifth book in Camilla Läckberg’s Fjällbacka crime series. It can stand alone though. Some of the characters have storylines that continue from previous books but I was able to follow along without having read all the other books.
This book had so many characters that it was hard to keep them all straight, especially listening to the audio book. Since the cast was so large, the narrator couldn’t come up with a unique voice for each one, which didn’t help my confusion. He did have a great dramatic tone and read with emotion.
I actually enjoyed the subplots involving the secondary characters more than I enjoyed the murder mystery that was the center of the plot. The timeline kept bothering me. I could never figure out how Erica’s mother could have been a teenager at the end of World War II and still have been young enough to have been Erica and her younger sister’s mother when they were born. I also couldn’t follow the revelation that Erica has towards the end that opens the murder mystery wide open. It didn’t make sense to me – it seemed like she came to her discovery out of the blue. So I much preferred reading about the police chief falling in love and learning to salsa dance and the police woman who was starting a family.
I didn’t like this book as much as I did The Stonecutter (the third book in the series and the only other one I’ve read) but I liked it enough that I want to keep reading more of the books in this series.
(I received this audio book courtesy of the Sold Gold Reviewers program at Audiobook Jukebox.)
