Behind Closed Doors - Carol Wyer

Reading Challenge Category: Free ARC from NetGalley

Official Blurb:

Two kidnappings, thirty years apart. Can Stacey face her own dark past in order to save her stepdaughter?
When Stacey’s ex-husband turns up on her doorstep begging her to help save his kidnapped thirteen-year-old daughter, Lyra, the terror is all too familiar. Stacey’s own violent kidnapping thirty years ago was never solved, and while a severe case of amnesia spares her from recalling the specific horrors, she remembers enough…
Stacey knows her father never paid the ransom—she has the missing pinkie finger to prove it. She knows she was only saved because of an anonymous tip-off to the police. And she knows her captor was never apprehended.
Lyra’s kidnappers have made it clear the police must not get involved. But Stacey can’t shake the eerie similarities between the two cases, and she’ll use whatever she can, from her journalistic powers to her shady contacts, to save Lyra from the same nightmare. Desperate to find any link between Lyra’s abduction and her own, Stacey forces herself to revisit her forgotten, traumatic past for clues.
But can she make sense of the terrible secrets she unearths in time to save Lyra? And if she does, is she ready to face her own tormentor?

My Thoughts:

This starts off really intriguing and disturbing as we see the atrocities that Stacy is enduring during being kidnapped.
When we jump forward 30 years, the story starts to fall relatively flat. What appears to be a copycat abducting of Stacey’s stepdaughter takes a very sinister turn. However, we take a prolonged journey through the book to get to that turn. The actions of the characters are very sleepy compared to the dire situation, and the decisions Stacey makes are frustrating. The main thing that annoyed me was why the mother wasn’t told. Yes, she was in the hospital, but her daughter was missing. It just made no sense and would have raised massive alarm bells for me, but it didn’t for Stacey.
Jack’s actions were too embellished. They needed to be more subtle; he was just too over the top, which again set alarm bells off.
The story plods through the middle to get to the big reveal, but by then, I’d lost a lot of interest in the book and found myself not really caring what Stacey would uncover about her abduction and what had happened to her stepdaughter.
Stacey was too weak a character for my liking. Way too passive. She had let her father get away with not protecting or saving her. She just accepts the situation and moves on. It was all bizarre behaviour.
So, I’m afraid I didn’t really enjoy this book. It started off well, and I thought I would be reading a blinder, but unfortunately, that wasn’t the case.