The Girls Left Behind - Emily Gunnis - ★★★.½

AUTHOR: Emily Gunnis

NARRATOR: Clare Corbett

GENRE: Historical Mystery-Drama.

RATING: 3.5 stars.

In a Nutshell: A historical mystery developing over multiple timelines and culminating in the present. Has its merits but also has loopholes. A fairly entertaining read, though not a mind-blowing one.

Story Synopsis:

In 1975, while summoned to a domestic dispute, constable Jo Hamilton mistakenly started a fire at the location. The two little girls at the house, Holly and Daisy, are saved, but their parents are killed. The girls are sent to the local children’s home named Morgate House, an old Victorian residence at the edge of a cliff. Jo tries to keep tabs over the girls, but Daisy is soon adopted. In a few years more, Holly goes missing, the mystery of which has stayed unsolved all this while.

Now, forty years later, some bones have been discovered at a digging site, and Jo, now a superintendent just a few days away from retirement, knows in her guts that they belong to Holly. Can the investigation finally come to a close with this new information?

The story comes to us from multiple timelines (1945, 1975, 1985, 2015) and the third person perspective of multiple female characters.

Bookish Yays:

😍 Most of the main characters aren’t classifiable as typical good or bad persons. They are flawed. Even Jo, who is a capable police officer, is very judgemental in her thinking. Regardless, these flaws make the characters more nuanced.

😍 Jo’s role as a women police officer offers plenty of insights about the inherent misogyny and patronising in a male-dominated profession. Through another character named Olive, we get to see how women dispatch riders functioned for Bletchley Park in the WWII era. Reading these unusual career perspectives in a fictional work was very interesting.

😍 There are many mother-daughter relationships in the book.; But unlike most historical fiction works, not a single one of them is a positive relationship. I liked this complicated portrayal of family dynamics.

😍 The book also highlights the apathetic attitude of the governing agencies towards orphans and abandoned kids in children’s homes and foster care. It’s sad that decisions about children were taken keeping adult conveniences in mind.

😍 There are a couple of death scenes in the story, and these are written brilliantly. The unnatural deaths gave me the creeps.

Bookish Mixed Bags:

😔 I enjoy historical books with multiple timelines. So seeing this book span four timelines was a surprise, especially as the blurb offered no hint of its being a saga. Keeping track of the timelines isn’t too difficult as the character voices are in third person. However, I feel that the 1945 timeline set in Bletchley Park wasn’t necessary at all. It had nothing concrete to offer to the core plot and felt like a way of padding the back story of one of the characters.

😔 Remembering the characters in each timeline is also not tricky as the characters recur in other timelines as well. They are also written distinctly enough as to not create confusion. However, some of the links between the characters across timelines are farfetched and coincidental. Even some secrets become obvious because of the extensive overlap. For two major characters, their personality undergoes a 180-degree shift in the final chapters.

Bookish Nays:

😒 The main mystery regarding the identity of the killer is fairly easy to solve. If you have read even a few mystery novels, you’ll figure it out very early in the proceedings. This is a major disappointment as the mystery is supposed to be the main focus of the book.

😒 The ending is too rushed and yet incomplete. It patches up things too neatly and abruptly, without bothering about filling in some missing gaps. Moreover, the mystery reveals the person but not the agenda or the modus operandi. These plot gaps reduce the impact of the ending.

😒 There are some prejudicial comments about topics such as stay-at-home mums and people with lazy eyes. These might be said/thought by the characters, but they sounded hypercritical and biased.

🎧 The Audiobook Experience:

The audiobook, clocking at 10 hrs 23 min, is narrated by Clare Corbett. Overall, her performance is pretty good. She has a great voice, and she enhances it further with varied accents and pitches for the characters. The only thing I didn’t like about her performance was when she was reading the more emotional scenes – her reading tone didn’t reflect the emotion, which made the emotion fall flat.

There are plenty of phone and despatch radio conversations in the book, and these are presented with a special effect that made them sound genuine. While this was fun at first, it became annoying as it went ahead .

I can still recommend the audio version, but only to experienced audiobook listeners. Newbies will get all muddled by the plethora of timelines.

All in all, this is a good historical mystery, which will work well as long as you don’t overanalyse it. The characters and their backgrounds are more compelling than the mystery itself, so better read as a historical drama than as a mystery-thriller.

3.5 stars, rounding up for the audio version. (It would easily have been a 4+ star read had the mystery been a bit more complicated and the timelines a bit more simplified and the ending a bit more detailed.)

My thanks to Headline and NetGalley for the ALC of “The Girls Left Behind”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the audiobook.