Recommended by the Reviewers Club
This isn’t the usual romantic love story set in an outback Western Australian town.
A 17-year-old girl was coerced to give up her baby to the older father and his wife. Now, years later, they separate, and the wife wants to hand the unwanted pre-teenage daughter over to foster care. Jaxine, the child’s mother hears of this and is finally given her child back, with all the associated problems of a child having shuttled through numerous foster families.
Then, a city police detective with whom three months previously she’d gone on a date with but had inexplicably left her stranded halfway through her meal, arrives back in town working undercover to investigate a drug track down a suspected drug trafficking group. The all-too-common love story in this style of Australian novel was kept very much in the background until the closing pages.
I found it a great read. A good detective story with exciting twists while at the same time revealing the difficulties of a mother trying desperately to establish a bond with a daughter she’d only ever held for an hour after she was born.
4/5 Stars