The Girl Who Came Back

May 23, 2016
In the prologue of this overwrought novel of suspense from British author Lewis (Too Close to Home), nine-year-old Amelia Quentin deliberately pushes her mother, Olivia, from a boat into the sea, where Olivia, who can't swim, drowns. Amelia suffers no consequences, but 16 years later she's released from prison for an unspecified crime that only becomes clear much later in the book, whose first half dwells on the idyllic life of London residents Jules Bright and her husband, Kian Bright. The couple's happiness is completed by the birth of their charismatic child, Daisy, though a shadow looms after Jules's first inauspicious meeting with Amelia and her family in Kesterly-on-Sea, England. The uneasy relationship that develops between the girls when they are teenagers ends with Daisy's disappearance and Amelia's arrest. Amelia's "bad seed" character is simply too unconvincing to make Lewis's story compelling. The ghost of a dead child hovers over the action to no apparent purpose.