There's a lot going on in this book!

Set around 2050 on an earth that is now a nightmarish worldscape of drought, fires, floods, war and rampant disease, a father searches for his abducted daughter.

A father is all I can call the man, because he's never given a name. I've thought on why that was and I haven't yet come up with a suitable answer. Perhaps that's to foster a certain distance from him in the reader? Because distance, or perhaps more accurately, disconnection, seems to be a theme here.

A disconnect from each other, (Am I my brother's keeper?), from the entire human population,(an overpopulation, as is often pointed out in the story), and from the earth overall; even a disconnect from our food and water supplies. We often aren't thinking about what humanity's effect on the earth will be, we just fill up our tanks, grill up our steaks and turn our water faucets on and have a drink.

The other main theme here is a bit of a trope: a man searching for his abducted daughter. In this respect, I don't feel any new ground was broken, though I was surprised at the final outcome.

For me, this book's world building was where the real story lived. I respect an imagination that can take current events and ramp them up realistically into large scale, worldwide tragedies. Sadly, at times I think this could be close to what actually happens, maybe what's already happening? For this reason, I think this thriller is a solid 4 star read.

Recommended for fans of thrillers and the "Taken" movies, but also for fans of imaginative world building that doesn't quite fit into the fantasy or sci-fi category.

*Thanks to Net Galley and the publisher for giving me this book in exchange for an honest review. This is it.*

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It’s not the fictional aspects of Lost Girl which will keep you wide awake at night, enduring endless dark hours between sweat-soaked fever dreams. It’s the entirely possible predictions of what might happen in the next 40 years that should snap you out of complacent daydreams. Forest fires blazing out of control across whole continents. SARS killing by the million. Entire countries flooded. The end of the world as we know it? Oh yes.

The author deserves massive credit for his masterful manipulation of solid scientific information, from which he weaves together an entirely plausible set of doomsday scenarios. Almost any of them alone could be catastrophic: the combination of climate change, pandemic, and uncontrolled mass migration which are portrayed in Lost Girl inevitably tips human society over the edge.

A less accomplished author might’ve struggled to deliver the relentless torrent of information and keep things interesting. Adam Nevill neither glosses over the detail nor does he deluge the reader in tedious technobabble. The hardcore science stuff provides a superb, solid foundation for Nevill to build an atmospheric edifice of accumulating evil. It’s never completely unequivocal – but the rising sense of sinister menace more than hints at something Very Bad, waiting to exploit the collapse of mankind’s moral fibre.

Then there’s the plot. Aggrieved father turns vigilante as society crumbles, attempting to find his little girl who was kidnapped two years ago. Ventures into the lion’s den of paedophiles, pushers and priests of the apocalypse. Actually, this was my least favourite part of the book. Didn’t empathise with the protagonist; resented his dazzling self-obsessed guilt-trip and staggering practical incompetence.

The writing is idiosyncratic, almost gothic in its traditional construction and metered obscurity. The narrative feels like it's been sculpted; the words hewn from a solid mass of inky blackness to create towering descriptive passages of massive intensity.

The publishers and most other readers classify this book as ‘horror’, and indeed it reveals an entirely horrific possible future. But it’s not especially supernatural, nor so graphically explicit that I would’ve automatically stacked it alongside slashers, blood noir and spooky schtick.

Lost Girl holds up an unflinching mirror to our reality, and it’s not a pretty sight. It does, however, also hold out a thin hope for humanity – and after reading this, you’ll probably feel that we need one.
8/10

There's a more detailed review over at https://murdermayhemandmore.wordpress.com/2015/11/16/lost-girl-truly-terrifying/ ( )

My original The Lost Girl audiobook review and many others can be found at Audiobook Reviewer.

It is the year 2053, climate change is wreaking havoc on the world: floods, droughts, starvation, disease, and mass migration north. The Father (we never learn his name) is living a semi-normal life in his upper middle class neighborhood in England with his wife and daughter when tragedy strikes. His four year-old daughter is abducted. The police are overwhelmed with hundreds of more serious crimes and do little to help. Driven somewhat insane with the loss and spiraling thoughts of what kind of depraved monster has taken his daughter, the Father takes matters into his own hands.

The story begins two years after the daughter’s abduction. The Father is working as a kind of free-lance interrogator with the secret help of sympathetic police officers. He crosses line after line of illegal behavior as he tortures, then kills his leads – child molesters and human traffickers. There seems to be no limit to the depravity of the men he finds. It is difficult for him to unsee their evil.

It is a dark world, spiraling quickly to a deadly end for all humanity. The backdrop of climate change and human misery keeps the mood bleak and the listener in a state of perpetual hopelessness, mirroring the Father’s own state. This well written jewel tends to dig deeply into metaphor, describing mood and events with great detail. While the story is full of action, violence and drama, it can also move slowly, methodically at times over sensations and detail. It is well worth the effort, just an observations for some impatient listeners, stay with it.

Without spoiling the plot, it is worth noting a particular character that is introduced late in the novel. This drug addled acolyte is so compelling and unusual, the listener will wish he had been brought into the story earlier. Reality itself bends around this strange person, inviting the listener to think differently about metaphysics, humanity and most interestingly – death.

The audiobook is performed by Kris Dyer, who is simply outstanding. The character voices are clearly differentiated and remarkable for their variety. Most notable are his female voices, which at times make the listener wonder if there wasn’t a second narrator. Mr. Dyer matches the dark mood of the novel in voice and inflection giving what can only be described as a near perfect performance. His is a voice worth following.

This is an outstanding novel performed exceptionally well. Its violent theme and dark mood will not appeal to every listener, however. It is about a vigilante father trying to recover his daughter or at the very least punish those who would have abused her. The attention to detail and the dire warning given in this dark novel make it well worth listening to. Highly recommended.

Warning: Scenes of extreme violence, torture and child abuse make this novel inappropriate for young listeners and others sensitive to these themes.

Audiobook was provided for review by the publisher. ( )

This work of fiction is probably best described as “dystopian” as it refers to the world or sees the creation in the world of a degraded society that is generally headed to an irreversible oblivion. Indeed the writing is at times so stark and raw that the descriptive prose takes on an almost apocalyptic feel. “The father might have become a wanderer in ancient times, put ashore in a sweltering hive of pirates, slaves, cut-throats, urchins and pickpockets, the dusty and desperate, wide-eyed beseechers and apostles of mutating faiths, increasingly confirmed by the signs of the end of times; all driven here from places baked to clay and burned to dust, arriving at a town besieged and battered by a remorseless yet increasingly lifeless sea.”

The father (we never get to know his real name, and the constant use of the noun is a little irritating) is searching for his daughter Penny who was kidnapped from their home in Torquay. The setting is 2053 and a very different and dysfunctional world than the present day. There is a mass migration of people from southern Europe and Africa creating a frenzy of resettlement and swathes of land in London and Liverpool flooded and swollen. A pandemic is spreading through the populations of Europe. There are chronic water shortages, fires, and droughts and old enemies are beginning to once again seek to destroy each other.

On his journey the father stops at the only pub in Brixham still open above the harbour. As he sips his locally brewed beer, seated comfortably at the window the old man next to him begins a conversation. This wily old stranger is one of many examples that Adam Nevill uses so brilliantly to create visual picture of a world in meltdown…”The old man wiped his beard. The planet’s been more than patient. It was around for over four billion years before we set the first fires to clear the land. But it only took ten thousand years in this inter-glacial period for us to spread like a virus. We were the mad shepherds who didn’t even finish a shift before we poisoned the farm and set fire to the barn. We’ve overheated the earth and dried it out. So it’s time for us to leave, I think. Don’t you?”

Built around a disintegrating and fractured country the father must continue his search. He brutally annihilates suspected pedophiles and in the process finds himself pursued by the feared gang King Death “Some kind of religion mixed with the worst kind of human behavior. Like the jihadists, but without an ultimate goal”

The author’s writing and style reminded me in some ways of The Road by Cormac McCarthy; an apocalyptic journey of a father and son across a landscape blasted by an unspecified cataclysm. From the very open sentence the reader is captivated…”The last time he had seen his daughter, she’d been in the front garden. Two years ago.”

This is certainly different to previous novels by Adam Nevill, his direct approach and well researched intelligent storytelling shows an author with a genuine flair for the imaginative and one who is not afraid to experiment. ( )