The Missing Years by Lexie Elliott

          The basic premise of the book is that Ailsa Calder is left her mother's half of her former childhood home, a remote Scottish Manse.  This leads her to reminiscences of her father who has been missing since she was 7 and to reconnect with her half sister Carrie.  It also gives her time to pause and consider her role as a field news producer and her subsequent relationship with a much older broadcast journalist.

Slotted in to the Crime and Mystery genre by the publishers, you do start to wonder where either of those fit in.  Is it the mystery of her father's death?  Is it the crime of the diamonds that went missing with him?  Certainly her father, Martin Calder, plays a large part in the book despite being missing.  Each chapter is preceeded by a short paragraph detailing what Ailsa thinks he might be up to, where he might have vanished to and very much hinging on the fact that he is alive.  Then, as events at The Manse start to catch up with her the thoughts become darker as she presumes he has met his death in a multitude of countries, in a multitude of ways.

Then you have The Manse itself, the house is very definitely set up as being a character in it's own right.  Initially this works well.  From Ailsa and Carrie's arrival at the property and the claustrophobia Ailsa feels, despite the sheer size of the property.  Unfortunately, the early tension is dissipated by the glacial pace of the story.  There is a constant rehashing of how Ailsa feels watched and unsafe in the house, how she can't sleep, how things happen but she is not sure if she is imagining them or if they are real.

I really struggled with this book as nothing really happens that draws you in to the story or the characters.  Ailsa herself is pretty much moribund and whiny, Carrie is flighty and never really exposes herself to the reader.  Even worse you then have the friendly neighbour who intrudes on their first night and his bizarre sister.  A range of stereotypical villagers who are either super friendly or completely antagonistic to the sisters.  The biggest issue is that it treads water for around 300 pages and then everything rushes to an ending that is, not to put too fine a point on it, ludicrous.

It turns out that there are lots of little crimes revealed in the book, there are some mysterys that get answered, and some that don't.  However, the main thrust of the book seems to be trying to unsettle the reader and give the impression that The Manse is somehow sentient.  I'm not entirely sure what the author was going for with the tale but it falls through so many gaps of genre and disappears down it's own plot holes frequently that it is pretty much unreadable in it's current format.  There is a good story battling to get out but page count seems to have triumphed and resulted in a book twice the length it needed to be to really ratchet up tension and involve the reader.

THIS IS AN HONEST REVIEW OF A FREE COPY OF THE BOOK RECEIVED FROM READERS FIRST.