Child Taken by Darren Young #BlogTour @darrenyoungbook @RedDoorBooks

How could such a thing happen?

But it did happen.

I wasn't one of the others, observing.

It happened to me.

One hot summer's day, two-year-old Jessica Preston disappears from the beach. The police are convinced she drowned, but Sandra Preston won't give up hope that her daughter is still alive.

How can she?

Twenty years later, another child goes missing, and Sandra is approached by a young journalist who raises questions about what really happened to Jessica Preston all those years ago. But when the journalist discovers someone with an explosive secret, it threatens not only to reveal what's been covered up for so long, but puts both their lives in danger.

Child Taken by Darren Young is published in paperback by Red Door Publishing on 18 May 2017 and is the author's debut novel.

I'm really happy to kick off the Blog Tour for Child Taken here on Random Things today.

Child Taken is a meticulously plotted thriller that I raced through in just a few days, despite the length of the book.
This is story of two missing girls, twenty years separate them. One girl is found quickly, the other has been missing for two decades.

Jessica Preston went missing from a beach, she was there, and then she was gone. Despite a massive search party, she was never found. When her sunhat was found, everyone assumed that she had drowned. Except for her mother Sandra, who is convinced that Jessica is alive. Sandra's world has fallen apart since Jessica disappeared; she spends her time in a secure unit, gazing out at the beach. Her losses overwhelm her.

Laura is an young journalist on a local paper. She stumbles upon Jessica's case and is intrigued. Something about the story pulls her in, and she risks her job and her family relationships in her quest to discover more. This investigation leads her to Danni, a young girl who has started to wonder about her own background.

Darren Young has created an intriguing and complex thriller in Child Taken, there are twists and turns a plenty and his different narrative voices add a depth and dimension to the story that is quite enticing. However, this is a long story, and at times it does suffer a little from too much 'tell' and not even 'show'; there are some long and quite rambling parts that contain detail that is not needed and don't really add to the story. Despite this, I enjoyed the story very much, there are some hair-raising scenes, really edge of the seat stuff and some interesting surprising twists that I certainly did not see coming.

An accomplished debut. I will be really interested to read what this author produces next. My thanks to the the publisher who sent my copy for review and invited me to take part in the Blog Tour.

Darren Young lives in Nottingham with his wife, Luisa and their two children, Alessio and Emilia.

Away from writing, he has a background in financial services and an MBA from the University of Wolverhampton and helps organisations to improve their customer service, whilst also being involved in producing papers and a weekly blog on the subject. He wanted to write something different; a story he’d like to read, one about ordinary people thrown into extraordinary positions and had the ideas but wasn’t sure that there was enough time, or coffee, to fit it into his already busy life. However, he started working on Child Taken in 2014 and found that there was. He’s currently working on a new version of the book he wrote for ‘practice’ before embarking on Child Taken and after two years writing about child abduction, he wanted to explore something a little lighter; heart transplants.

Follow Darren on Twitter @darrenyoungbook