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A claustrophobic and disturbing crime thriller. Deliberately confusing with plenty of twists.

This is a tense and disturbing psychological thriller that can be difficult to read at times. Not everyone in Oundle Crime chose to read it, but those who did said it wasn’t for the faint-hearted.

The plot echoes some true-life crimes that have been reported in recent years. The story starts explosively, with a woman being hospitalised after a hit-and-run accident. Once stabilised she tells the police that she’s Lena, a girl who had been kidnapped 14 years ago and never heard of since. She has, apparently, escaped her captor, along with a 12-year-old girl called Hannah.

Lena had originally gone missing after leaving a party in the early hours of the morning. Despite the subsequent police inquiry and her father Matthias’s desperate attempts to keep media interest alive (and to redeem his daughter’s tarnished reputation) the case had gone cold. The woman in hospital fits Lena’s description, even down to the distinctive scar on her forehead.

Lena explains that she was abducted and imprisoned in an isolated cabin in the woods somewhere in Germany, near to the Czech border. The man who took her not only brutalised her to make her toe-the-line, but forced her to live as his wife and mother to his two children.

To begin with everyone believes the young woman is Lena, but then it turns out she isn’t. The story is told by three characters: Lena/the young woman and kidnap victim; Hannah the 12-year-old girl; and Matthias, Lena’s father. It is these voices which explain what happened, but as the chapters unfold it becomes almost impossible to discern what is the truth.

The Munich police are also involved, of course, but they aren’t central to the story and this isn’t a police procedural. It’s a tense and difficult tale with a very complicated plot. One of us found it confusing but clever; another thought some of the plot twists were overdone. Everyone thought it was quite good, even though the subject was so difficult, but we also found it creepy and compelling.

The highest accolade was a ‘cautious 4-Stars’. We suspect this could be classified as a ‘Marmite’ book – something you either like or hate. If psychological suspense is your thing, this is a novel to look out for.
Review by: Oundle Crime

The book opens 13 years after 23-year old Lena disappeared. She had been at a college party and was never seen again. And then there is a hit and run in which a woman is found badly hurt at the side of the road, with Hannah, a young child in attendance. They are rushed to hospital and Hannah is looked after by nursing staff while the woman receives medical attention. During the course of the conversation it transpires that Hannah calls this woman Lena and refers to her as her mother. From other things that she says it also appears that they have been living in a shack in the woods with her younger brother and their Papa in somewhat bizarre circumstances. Alarm bells begin to ring and the police alert Lena’s father, Matthias, to the possibility that Lena has been found. He arrives at the hospital but something just isn’t making sense. The story begins to unfold into a psychological thriller extraordinaire, told from the points of view of “Lena”, Hannah and Matthias.

I loved this book. In fact, I don’t think I have ever finished a book in quite so short a space of time (just over two days and I am a very slow reader). My main problem is that I only read in bed or on public transport – during the pandemic the latter is virtually out of bounds so I spent the best part of the two days in bed!! I found it absolutely gripping and didn’t want to put it down. There is tension, intrigue and a mystery to be solved, all of which are executed with a great deal of skill to maximise the suspense and create huge amounts of stress for the reader!

Despite the high praise lavished on it so far, this book is not perfect. For a start it is deliberately confusing. At least I assume it’s deliberate. At the start I found it quite irritating because it seemed so contrived. It also meant that I was losing any flow to the book as I was constantly stopping to try and work out what was going on. As the book progressed things improved, largely I think because my determination to enjoy a good read was stronger than my desire to understand the finer details so I just started to go with the flow. In a similar vein, the way information was withheld was done in a fairly clumsy way on occasions. On the whole I think plot gadgets of this sort should be seamless and should not be noticed by the reader but when something is alluded to which has not yet been disclosed, it is anything but seamless – the first two times it happened I spent fruitless minutes flicking through the pages trying to find out what I had missed, only to eventually give up and carry on reading only to discover that the information explaining these cryptic comments had not yet been revealed but was given a few pages further on. This is not clever, it’s just annoying. Despite all of this, the book still earns its 5 stars.

This is a very accomplished debut novel, the author’s first that has been translated into English. I would highly recommend it to everybody who likes a good psychological thriller, and possibly also to those who don’t. I hope there are more where this came from.

This book probably deserves a higher rating (and looking at other Goodreads reviews, it's certainly received its fair share of 5-stars) but I found the experience of reading it to be so confusing and unpleasant that I really can't give it any higher.

To begin with, the premise is cliche. A woman has been abducted by a crazy man who keeps her and several children in a cabin where they have no contact with the outside world. Interesting, but not original in the slightest.

The originality of this novel comes from its twists and turns. The woman rescued from the cabin isn't the original woman who was abducted, and the children aren't her children. So who is she, and what happened to the original woman? Hausmann certainly does a good job of holding back a series of incredible revelations that will keep readers turning pages... but the cost of these revelations is that the story is too confusing to be enjoyable. Key details that the viewpoint characters know are withheld from the readers simply to generate mystery. Moreover, characters lie to each other or keep quiet on key issues simply for the convenience of the plot, rather than any realistic reason.

Most frustratingly, the novel is full of plot holes. I can't list any here because of spoilers, but I noticed several significant holes, and I'm normally pretty blind to that sort of thing. Of course, it's possible that they weren't plot holes at all and I'm mistaken, but I really struggled to follow this novel. It got to the point where, when the big reveal of the bad guy's name occurred at the end, I spent three pages trying to remember who the guy was...

Overall, this novel may well be worth reading as it seems like most other Goodreads reviewers enjoyed it. Also, considering that the novel was originally written in German and then translated into English, obviously several publishing houses don't share my opinion. But, all that said, I'd personally give this one a wide berth.

Goodreads Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3826306818