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A review by artbreakerbookclub
Village of the Lost Girls by Agustín Martínez
3.0
Thank you to netgalley and Quercus books for providing me with an arc of this book for an honest review.
I love it when a tagline grabs your attention and straight away you know you have to read it: Two went missing. One returned. The hunt for the other begins.
Ana and Lucia were eleven year old friends when they disappeared walking home from school one day. But five years later, Ana is discovered badly injured but alive after a car crash. The race is on to figure out the case and find Lucia, dead or alive.
The book takes place in the Spanish village of Monteperdido "This was a walled village, built to protect itself from outsiders" The village is filled with shady characters, with friends and neighbours turning against one another. And it is up to outsider detective Sara Campos to get under the skin of the villagers and work out who is telling the truth.
The setting of the book, the Spanish Pyrenees mountains felt like another character in the book. The descriptions of the nature, the valleys and gorges, the unforgiving terrain, gave another element to the story. "The two faces of Monteperdido. Within a few weeks, this valley teaming with life would be frozen. Dead. Once the summer ended, the trees would lose their leaves, the river would freeze over, the animals would retreat into the mountains, the houses would be covered by a mantle of snow. Everything hibernating. And, buried beneath the snow, all the secrets people refused to bring out into the open"
Some unpleasant subjects such as peadophilia come up and it was uncomfortable reading at times. This was a slow burner. Sometimes complicated but always intriguing.
I love it when a tagline grabs your attention and straight away you know you have to read it: Two went missing. One returned. The hunt for the other begins.
Ana and Lucia were eleven year old friends when they disappeared walking home from school one day. But five years later, Ana is discovered badly injured but alive after a car crash. The race is on to figure out the case and find Lucia, dead or alive.
The book takes place in the Spanish village of Monteperdido "This was a walled village, built to protect itself from outsiders" The village is filled with shady characters, with friends and neighbours turning against one another. And it is up to outsider detective Sara Campos to get under the skin of the villagers and work out who is telling the truth.
The setting of the book, the Spanish Pyrenees mountains felt like another character in the book. The descriptions of the nature, the valleys and gorges, the unforgiving terrain, gave another element to the story. "The two faces of Monteperdido. Within a few weeks, this valley teaming with life would be frozen. Dead. Once the summer ended, the trees would lose their leaves, the river would freeze over, the animals would retreat into the mountains, the houses would be covered by a mantle of snow. Everything hibernating. And, buried beneath the snow, all the secrets people refused to bring out into the open"
Some unpleasant subjects such as peadophilia come up and it was uncomfortable reading at times. This was a slow burner. Sometimes complicated but always intriguing.