Disturbing, gripping, unputtdownable (is that a word?). Thought provoking, my first book by this author and it won’t be my last. Thank you so much.

Wow this book was a wild ride!

I find kidnapping stories so fascinating and gripping. There's some something about them, so dark, so twisted, so messed up! Dear Child ticks all those boxes and more!

This kidnap story was truly gripping. Short chapters leaving you continuously wanting more and so many twists I didn't know whether I was coming or going!

The story starts when Lena escapes her prison and captor and it's told as memories and flashbacks. We also have points of view from Lena's father and her daughter Hannah.

Hannah is such a fascinating character! She deserves her own book in the future I think, I'd love to read it!

This book is dark, sick and twisted. It's pact and addictive and I couldn't put it down. It maybe slowed down slightly in the middle and the ending left you feeling a bit "wtf?" But I loved the whole reading experience so for me it gets the full 5 stars!

This is a cleverly constructed thriller, driven by believable characters with noir themes. Suspense undulates, and the twists, lies and subterfuge, keep the reader guessing until the end.

I received a copy of this book from Quercus via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

If you need a distraction from normal life at the moment you can't go far wrong with this gripping thriller. This is a complex, dark and highly satisfying read.I will be looking out for more books from this author.

I would like to thank the author, the publisher and NetGalley for giving me the opportunity to read this book. It was a very good read with many twists and turns and although there were some quite harrowing scenes, I found I had to keep reading it as it was so compelling.

Disturbing, chilling and mesmerising in equal measure. Intelligent and original. So gripping I read it in one sitting.

'Dear Child' by Romy Hausmann was featured in '20 books to look out for in 2020' on Caboodle from National Book Tokens.

With thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for the arc, which I have enjoyed reading.
Dear Child by Romy Hausmann is a debut book for the author and it is extremely fascinating, clever, entertaining and thoroughly engrossing. The storyline is well written and well crafted and the characters are fascinating, the children in particular are intriguing. I found the book totally engrossing and wouldn’t hesitate to read other future books by the author.
Highly recommended.

A book I simply had to keep reading. It has many unexpected twists & turns. The story is divided into different sections, each narrated by one of the main characters, telling their part so that it all pieces together. It’s a chilling tale.

This is a dark tale of kidnap and torture that starts with the victim's escape but goes on to build into a disturbing thriller.

I liked the darkness but the story style wasn't for me. Too often we had cliff-hanger endings to characters POV "chapters" for them to take too long resolve I felt strung along.

If you enjoy a dark thriller give this ago.

Totally gripping book about a woman and child found after a hit and run and the link to a kidnapping from years ago. Couldn’t put it down I loved it

Dear Child by Romy Houseman is a fast paced psychological thriller focusing on the aftermath of an abduction. It’s truly chilling in parts and describes the effects of capture and isolation in gruesome detail. However, the narrative is never gratuitous. Rather the writer conveys the horror through the thoughts and feelings of the survivors. I found some of the secondary characters a bit difficult to differentiate from each other, not knowing who would become a key character but overall I enjoyed the book. My thanks to Netgalley and Quercus Editions Ltd for the advance copy.

OMG! What have I just read? This book was phenomenal! How could this be a debut? It is way too good for that! I seriously felt like I was in a Criminal Minds episode waiting for Derek Morgan to burst in, gun blazing, ready to save the day. Simply put, DEAR CHILD by Romy Hausmann is deliciously dark, disturbingly twisted and super creepy. And one of the best psychological thrillers I have read.

Twenty-three year old Lena Beck has been missing 4,993 days, whens he disappeared after leaving a student party and never returned home. Her father Matthias has never given up hope that his daughter would be found alive...but 13 years later and still there has been no sign of her. Then one day, Matthias receives a call from his friend Gerd Brühling, a police inspector, to say that a woman fitting Lena's description has been found, a victim of a hit and run accident and is in a hospital near the Czech border a couple of hours away.

Matthias and his wife Karin immediately make the two hour journey, eager to see their daughter alive again. But when Matthias walks into her room and sees the woman laying there, he knows at once it is not his daughter. It is not Lena. And so the grief hits them once again. But then...a little girl walks up to the hospital room with a nurse and she is the spitting image of Lena as a child. Whoever the woman in that room is, this child is Lena's daughter. His granddaughter.

The young woman lays in her hospital bed and relives the trauma from which she has escaped. She was awake when the man came into the room and told the detectives that she wasn't Lena...and yet that is the name by which she's now known. So this is Lena's father. But who is the woman in the hospital bed? Her daughter said her name is Lena...but she clearly is not. What should she tell the detectives? What shall I say, Lena?

The woman was abducted and she awoke tied in a basement. She was given a set of rules by which she must abide or else face punishment. When she accepted the inevitable she was then allowed to join him upstairs in the cabin...where she was greeted by her children, Hannah and Jonathan. The woman is shocked. Who are these children? Are they your children, Lena? Is this your husband? But why does he call me "Lena" and the children call me "mama"?

The cabin in which they live deep in the forest has boarded up windows, double locked doors and a re-circulation device which breathes oxygen into the rooms to keep them alive. But is this living? They are governed by a world of rules, locked doors and scheduled bathroom times and never see the light of day. This is her world now and the only world that the children have ever known. The man is brutal if you dare to question his authority or break any of his rules. But the woman bides her time until the day she will escape this prison.

When the woman saw her opportunity she took it, killing her captor then running and running until she saw the beams of a car's headlights...and ran straight into its path. She was vaguely aware of Hannah's voice beside her as the ambulance paramedics asked if she could hear them and what was her name. She heard Hannah's voice tell them "Lena. Her name is Lena." But if she thought the nightmare was over, she was wrong. It was only just beginning...

As the police try to piece the puzzle together, Matthias becomes impatient for results. He wants to know what happened to his daughter and why this woman says she is Lena when clearly she isn't. And then there is the child, Hannah, who is very obviously Lena's daughter. Matthias gives a smile as he realises that she had named her after his mother, her own grandmother. But what does it all mean? Matthias is sure that the woman knows more than she is saying for her story doesn't completely add up. Desperate for answers, he seeks the support of the media despite disapproving of the things they wrote about Lena in the first place. Maybe they can push the police into doing something.

But what he doesn't know is that the children - Hannah and Jonathan - are also keeping deadly secrets. For even though they have physically escaped, they are also mentally scarred.

A disturbingly dark read, DEAR CHILD is a chilling psychological thriller that is fast paced and has you turning the pages at the speed of light, devouring as much as you can to discover the truth about the what really happened behind the walls of the creepy cabin in the woods.

The story opens with a Prologue that is the abducted woman biding her time and planning her escape which swiftly moves into the story of missing woman Lena Beck. As the story progresses we are introduced to three main narratives - Lena, Hannah and Matthias. It's Hannah's chapters which are the most revealing to begin with. They are chilling as she recalls events in a matter of fact way, reciting words as reading from a textbook and ending with a fullstop at the end of each such sentence. She appears to be a twisted little child and one isn't sure what to make of her of her motives. Her quirky traits appear a little sociopathic and her smile somewhat twisted, earning her the moniker "zombie girl" by the media. Is she more involved than people think? Or is she just an innocent victim in all of this? After all, she is just a 13 year old child who has never seen life outside of the cabin or beyond the man she calls "papa".

As soon as I read that opening I became imprisoned alongside "Lena", trapped within the pages I couldn't stop turning in a book I could not put down despite the disturbing and horrifying details of abuse and violence...because I just had to uncover the secrets and find out what happens next. And most of all, the truth behind what happened to Lena Beck.

DEAR CHILD is such an accomplished thriller that it is hard to believe it is a debut. It felt like an episode of Criminal Minds - so dark and disturbing and chillingly twisted. I loved every minute of it. The nightmares the woman suffers, the catatonic muteness Jonathan takes on, the robotic lack of emotion that makes Hannah appear sociopathic. And the broken puzzle that is Matthias and his wife Karin living in the hope that they will one day find their daughter alive. It's the exploration of the psychology behind such a trauma like abduction through these characters is what makes DEAR CHILD such an outstanding thriller.

Creepy and disturbing, DEAR CHILD is a chilling tale with a compelling and gripping plot that will haunt you for some time. To say I loved it is an understatement. Already I have marked the date of Romy Hausmann's next thriller "Sleepless" , and I eagerly await the day it hits the shelves.

Overall, a brilliant thriller that is as addictive as it is disturbing, that intrigues throughout and loses nothing in translation. Thoroughly recommended for those who love their psychological thrillers dark and chilling.

I would like to thank #RomyHausmann, #NetGalley and #Quercus for an ARC of #DearChild in exchange for an honest review.

This was a great book to read full of twists and turns. It was a chilling page-turner and I couldn't put the book down until I had finished it.

The story started off really well and answered many questions towards the end. There were however, some questions left unanswered or not explained well in the book e.g. Had Hannah met her grandfather before or did she have a great imagination of picturing him in her mind based on Lena's description of him?

Mathias was slightly dull and I didn't find his wife pleasant. However, the actual story was really good to keep me going and to continue to read the paragraphs from Mathias' perspective.

The book was very easy to read, slightly short but very punchy and to the point. The ending was very unexpected and a great way to finish the book. I will definitely recommend this book and I'm looking forward to reading more books from the author.

A book you have to keep reading. Twisty, creepy, dark. Made more compelling by three flawed narrators, each with their own psychological traumas to overcome.

A rather dark book, but a good read nevertheless. I like books like this that have obviously taken their inspiration from real life cases, but put a creepy, twisty spin on them. Recommended.

A thrilling novel on a unique take on abduction.
One of those sort of books that you have to keep reading as it goes along as it gets better and better.
I did enjoy the twists in this book but was very confused about Hannah meeting the Grandfather in the past. Did she actually meet him??
Not a perfect book- but definitely good enough to recommend.

A sinister and creepy thriller which draws you onward through the story with a clever use of multiple unreliable narrators whose stories don't quite chime with each other, leaving the reader thinking 'just one more chapter' in an effort to get to the underlying truth.

Well written and fluently translated, my only niggle was some of the characters' actions seemed implausible, but necessary to keep the plot moving to its conclusion.

Dear Child is a dark yet heart-wrenching thriller by Romy Hausmann.

“Lena had been missing for 4993 days. And nights. That’s over thirteen years.” Dear Child by Romy Hausmann.

Lena is held captive in a cabin deep in the woods. Every second of her day and that of her two children is controlled by her captor and father of her children. From bedtimes and meal times, even visits to the bathroom, every activity is strictly planned by her captor and any deviation to this schedule is met with the harshest of punishments.
Lena’s parents and the police had continued to search for her since the day she disappeared fourteen years ago until the day she managed to escape her prison.
But is she really who she says she is?

The story is told from the point of view of Lena, her daughter, Hannah and Lena’s father Mathias. This helped me as the reader to witness this story, these experiences from the different perspectives which I found useful and interesting but also a little frustrating at times but this may be because the characters themselves were frustrating.
As the story unfolded, we discovered more about what happened within the walls of that terrifying cabin and with each new revelation the darker this story became. It was descriptive enough without being too gory for which I was grateful for with this subject matter.

I enjoyed reading this book and do recommend if you are ready for a dark and disturbing read.

Thank you to NetGalley, Romy Hausmann and the publisher for the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review.

I've been in a reading slump lately, reading book after book that I didn't really like or that I found to be decidedly average. And then this story came along and I loved it! It was such an easy read, and I loved the speed at which it moved along. I was gripped from the very beginning and even though the first few chapters were a little confusing, this just served to add to the mystery and I couldn't wait to find out exactly what had happened at the cabin, who it had happened to, and where the disconnects lay.
I also loved the fact that this story was narrated by 3 different characters. For me, that always serves to keep things interesting. And having a child narrate some of the story was even better, because children always see the world through such different eyes. Their perceptions of people and situations often leave one quite taken aback.
This is a rather complex story, but not necessarily complicated, and once I got the hang of who was who, and what was actually happening, I followed the events fairly easily. I can't say that I loved all of the characters, but that didn't detract from my enjoyment of this read.
Overall, this was a great read, and one that I definitely recommend.