The Marsh King's Daughter by Karen Dionne

BLURB

The suspense thriller of the year - The Marsh King's Daughter will captivate you from the start and chill you to the bone.

'I was born two years into my mother's captivity. She was three weeks shy of seventeen. If I had known then what I do now, things would have been a lot different. I would have been a lot more understanding of my mother. I wouldn't have adored my father.'

When the notorious child abductor known as the Marsh King escapes from a maximum security prison, Helena immediately suspects that she and her two young daughters are in danger.

No one, not even her husband, knows the truth about Helena's past: they don't know that she was born into captivity, that she had no contact with the outside world before the age of twelve - or that her father raised her to be a killer.

And they don't know that the Marsh King can survive and hunt in the wilderness better than anyone...except, perhaps his own daughter.

Packed with gripping suspense and powerful storytelling, The Marsh King's Daughter is  one-more-page, read-in-one-sitting thriller that you'll remember for ever.


MY THOUGHTS

The Marsh King’s Daughter by Karen Dionne is a novel I won’t be forgetting about for a long while. It is a powerful, emotional story about a girl defined by her past but who desperately seeks to control her own destiny.

Helena is a young woman with two daughters and a loving husband, Stephen. She lives a tranquil life and earns money for her family by making jam and jelly. But Helena is no ordinary young woman. Helena grew up in captivity. Her mother was kidnapped as a young girl by Helena’s father and gave birth to her during the time that she was held captive. For fourteen years they were both under Helena’s father’s control before their miraculous rescue. But now, Helena’s father has escaped from prison, Helena fears for her family’s safety and heads out into the wilderness to track him down.

The Marsh King’s Daughter has to be one of the best books I have read this year. Karen’s writing is very addictive and she draws you into the story. The novel is told over two timelines, in the present when Helena has learnt the news of her father’s escape and the time when she and her mother were her father’s prisoners. Both stories were equally captivating and there were heart wrenching moments in each. The pace in the novel is excellent, I raced through the final chapters and Karen really delivers on the ending. The book definitely kept me reading well into the night.

This is a novel that you’ll want to watch out for in the summer. A great read. Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for providing me with a copy to read.

Publisher: Sphere

Publication date: 13th June 2017

Print length: 322 pages

CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE