Daughter by Jane Shemilt

Title: Daughter
Author: Jane Shemilt
ISBN: 9781405915298
Publisher: Penguin
Publish Date: January 2015

Synopsis:

Jenny is a successful family doctor, the mother of three great teenagers, married to a celebrated neurosurgeon.

But when her youngest child, fifteen-year-old Naomi, doesn’t come home after her school play, Jenny’s seemingly ideal life begins to crumble. The authorities launch a nationwide search with no success. Naomi has vanished, and her family is broken.

As the months pass, the worst-case scenarios—kidnapping, murder—seem less plausible. The trail has gone cold. Yet for a desperate Jenny, the search has barely begun. More than a year after her daughter’s disappearance, she’s still digging for answers—and what she finds disturbs her. Everyone she’s trusted, everyone she thought she knew, has been keeping secrets, especially Naomi. Piecing together the traces her daughter left behind, Jenny discovers a very different Naomi from the girl she thought she’d raised.

My Thoughts:
Every parents nightmare is a missing child. When 15 year old Naomi goes missing, the lives of her family start to fall apart. Told from Naomi's mother, Jenny's, point of view, Daughter is a story of betrayals and secrets.
The story bounces between the past and the present, slowly revealing information and clues about what happened on that fateful night. The pacing was perfect, with enough information given at the right times to keep the pages turning and the reader guessing. I did find the main character, Jenny, irritating and not very engaging, making her difficult to relate to, but I could not help but feel for her circumstances, despite not liking her as a character.
Daughter is a solid mystery and family drama with many twists and secrets that kept me guessing. An engaging read.
Thanks to Penguin Books Australia and Netgalley for the review copy.