#BookReview Here and Gone by Haylen Beck @HaylenBeck @vintagebooks

Here and Gone by Haylen Beck
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Here and Gone is a gripping, wonderfully tense suspense thriller about a mother's desperate fight to recover her stolen children from corrupt authorities.

It begins with a woman fleeing through Arizona with her kids in tow, trying to escape an abusive marriage. When she's pulled over by an unsettling local sheriff, things soon go awry and she is taken into custody. Only when she gets to the station, her kids are gone. And then the cops start saying they never saw any kids with her, that if they're gone than she must have done something with them...

Meanwhile, halfway across the country a man hears the frenzied news reports about the missing kids, which are eerily similar to events in his own past. As the clock ticks down on the search for the lost children, he too is drawn into the desperate fight for their return.

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I have to admit that the book turned out to be better than I had expected. I read a lot of thrillers and lately, I felt a too many of them have an unstable woman as the main character, either past traumas, addiction, psychological problems, etc. So, I was hoping that this book would turn out to be better than I had expected when I started to read the book.

Audra has left her abusive husband and travels to the country with her two young children. However, when she is stopped by a cop in a little town her whole life turns into an even worse hell than the one she left. At the police station, the cops claim that she had no children with her when they arrested her and suddenly she is suspected of having killed her own children. As the TV reports start to report this event a man watches the news, and for him is this a chock because five years earlier, his wife went through the same thing...

Here and Gone is a fabulous thriller about a desperate mother hunt to get her children back. First, one doesn't know why they were taken, but then you start to realize the chilling truth. They couldn't have picked a better victim than Audra with her past addiction problem that could be turned against her. Through flashbacks, we get to see how right from the start her husband took control of her life and how he together with his mother dominated her life. It took some serious willpower to break free from that life and now she sits in a hotel room, accused of murdering her own children.

The most chilling aspect of this book is the realization about what happened to the children, why they were taken. Through the older child's POV, do we get to know what happens when they were taken and that I think actually gave some home to know what's happening to them. I mean, just leaving out the children's part would probably have added more angst to the situation. To an already angst-ridden situation.

I want to thank the publisher for providing me with a free copy through NetGalley for an honest review!