Only Daughter by Anna Snoekstra

My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars

Category: Adult
Genre: Mystery



In 2003, sixteen-year-old Rebecca Winter disappeared.

Eleven years later she is replaced.

Bec Winters went missing eleven years ago. In present day a young woman has just been caught shoplifting food and knowing she has to find a way out of going to jail, she decides to tell the police that she is the missing Bec Winters, whom she looks a lot like, and that she has just escaped from the place she has been held all these years.

If that sounds hard to pull off, then you are not alone in thinking so. I kind of thought the premise of the book was a bit far-fetched, but then a person can change a lot in eleven years, especially from a teen to an adult. The impersonator here has quite a few close calls as she dodges police questions and DNA and blood tests to keep her secret. Despite it seeming unlikely that she would get away with this impersonation, I still very much enjoyed Only Daughter.

I really did not find the impersonator very likable (it's kind of hard to like someone who pretends to be someone's long lost daughter) or Bec for that matter, but in the end they both grew on me. The impersonator because of how she changes as a person and Bec because what happens to her makes her more sympathetic in the end.

The book switches back and forth between the impersonator's (I don't think we are ever told her name, at least I don't remember it) point of view in the present and Bec's point of view in the past. The mystery is very slow to unfold and, to me that is one of the books weaknesses. It drags a bit at times because of this. Not much is revealed until nearly the end. There were clues, but it was hard to put them together and make sense out of them. There were also a few people who acted suspicious but then completely normal at the same time, and there were a couple of people that seemed like obvious predators.

I chose to read this because I was in the mood for a good mystery. I feel like it lived up to that expectation because it kept me guessing all the way through. I really would have liked more closure at the end with a couple of people, but this was still a good read and I sped through it despite the things I didn't like or found far-fetched. I recommend giving it a try.



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