#BookReview ‘The Final Child’ by Fran Dorricott

About the book…

A stunning psychological thriller from the author of ‘After The Eclipse’, for readers of Ruth Ware and S.K Tremayne.

Erin and her brother Alex were the last children abducted by ‘the Father’, a serial killer who only ever took pairs of siblings. She escaped, but her brother was never seen again. Traumatised, Erin couldn’t remember anything about her ordeal, and the Father was never caught.

Eighteen years later, Erin has done her best to put the past behind her. But then she meets Harriet. Harriet’s young cousins were the Father’s first victims and, haunted by their deaths, she is writing a book about the disappearances and is desperate for an interview. At first, Erin wants nothing to do with her. But then she starts receiving sinister gifts, her house is broken into, and she can’t shake the feeling that she’s being watched. After all these years, Erin believed that the Father was gone, but now she begins to wonder if he was only waiting…

Thank you ever so much to the publishing team at Titan Books for the gifted review copy of ‘The Final Child’, Fran’s second novel, which is published on September 7th in paperback!

I liked this book, the hook really grabbed me, and the narrative which sought to frame not only the experiences and names of the children taken, as opposed to defining them by the acts of their killer, is a bold move.

By giving the kidnapper/killer the moniker ‘The Father’, and having 2 relative strangers, bonded by circumstance , investigate his crimes, gave a familiarity with Erin(Jillian as she was known when kidnapped) and Harriet (cousin to the two possible first boys kidnapped, Jem and Mikey) and a distance from the perpetrator who remains faceless and nameless for most of the book. Sadly, this often returned power to him in the vein of ‘he who walks behind the rows’ or ‘he who shall not be named.’

When returning the power to the children and the families with repetition of their names is a successful trait in The Final Child, the anonymity of Father gives him a mythological, boogeyman type status which sometimes undermines that effect.

It explores the things that most other novels do not-how do those left behind cope?

The person shaped hole in their lives….can it ever be filled?

And how do we treat the family of the boy and girl taken, Jillian and Alex, of whom only one returns?

Are they, as they are often told, ‘lucky’?

It certainly does not seem lucky, in fact, Jillian has not only adapted her name to her middle one, Erin, she feels she is a no man’s land of survivor guilt and inability to move on. Her lack of memories, her brain’s way of getting her to cope with the trauma, leaves her with little to no knowledge of their time incarcerated, and she fills it with meaningless sex, destructive relationships, and hiding who she is.

Harriet, on the other hand, seeks to turn back the clock and examine, in close detail, the stories of the missing, and focus on the children and the relatives left behind. After the case has been concluded, or gone cold, are the families left in limbo? The scenes where the surviving parents meet up because their shared experience is so unique, that they are trapped in an endless grief with only each other to lean on, are particularly poignant. Especially when Erin relates how she was made to feel almost unwelcome, that ‘luck’ striking again.

Harriet’s entire childhood is caught in amber, almost like a snowglobe that she can shake, and recall Jem and Mikey from her fragmented memories. Their kidnap and murder, remaining unsolved, has shown the dark side of childhood danger, the possibility of vanishing, never to be found. It also feels like the children that she knew, belong to the public at large and so, when she finds a crumbled newspaper underneath her mother’s lino, a DIY project turns internal as she commits to tackling these stories in the hope of peace for her unquiet mind.

In the space between the things which Harriet and Erin have been through, a relationship cautiously builds, Harriet’s theory that her cousins were not the first ones chosen, leads her journalist/writer’s instinct down some very nasty paths. Erin, who has spent so much time building defences against the past, has found herself trapped within them and with Harriet’s support, not only do they realistically chase down ideas, suspects, etc, they can go to the places where people will talk to them, as opposed to the police.

Chilling and ominously shadowed by bizarre, yet explainable occurrences-an open window, a moved piece of furniture, a feeling of being followed-the shadows coalesce into a nightmare made real. Father is not only genuinely scary, and here I have to be careful not to give any spoilers away, it throws a sharp relief of the expected gender roles of parents, and how societal constraints on these can go hideously wrong.

What I loved about this book so much was Harriet and Erin’s narration, their first person voices overlapped a little and sometimes I had to go back to remember who was speaking, but their naturally occurring relationship was lovely to observe unfurling. These are two Sapphic protagonists, and again, I hope this is phrased correctly and inoffensively, they were naturally Sapphic. By that I mean they were characters who were naturally gay they weren’t there to serve a plot point, provide titillation or any other function, they just were.

A bugbear of mine is when characters are brought in to show how progressive the writer is, you can tell when someone is shoehorned into a story to fit a purpose, here they are just Harriet and Erin, two women who, defined by events on their childhood, come together to tackle, defeat and bring into the light the source of their nightmares.

Apart from a couple of niggles regarding plot holes, and slightly too much repetition (you have more than enough reminders of who was taken when and who was affected by what, there is a cohesive timeline of events at the start of the book and I felt it was almost unnecessary to say -paraphrasing here-‘Erin, whose brother Alex had been kidnapped with her and never found’ or ‘Harriet, whose cousins were the first pair taken’.

As a mystery, it works, it is a thriller with borderline horror undertones and will definitely appeal to those who read, and enjoyed Fran’s first novel,’After The Eclipse’, ‘The Whisper Man’ by Alex North, or any of CJ Tudor‘s books.

About the author…

Fran Dorricott is a bookseller and author.

She studied creative writing at the University of East Anglia, and she received a distinction for her MA in Creative Writing from City University London.

Her day job in a bookshop is secretly just a way for her to fuel her ridiculous book-buying addiction. The opportunity to draw inspiration from the many wonderful and whacky customer requests is also a plus.

Links-https://www.franwritesstuff.com/

Twitter @franwritesstuff @TitanBooks