The Next Girl by Carla Kovach

One of the classic types of psychological thriller drama is a kidnapping. For anyone who has had children, or maybe even younger siblings, this is their worst nightmare. And the thing that makes this kind of story so easy to engage with is the fact that it could happen to you. It could easily happen to anyone. But what if the person who was taken away wasn’t your child or your younger sibling? What if that person was you? Suddenly those doors stopping you from empathising with a character are pulled wide open and you are thrown straight into a situation that you never thought you would have to deal with, left wondering: what would I do if it were me? Being taken is something most adults don’t usually even think about, let alone worry about. But the fact is that it could happen to anyone at anytime. Never before has a story forced me to look over my shoulder so many times whilst reading it. For me, The Next Girl, by Carla Kovach, made me look at the world in a slightly different way. It made me question everything and everyone and it gave me the ability to think deeper about what might be going on inside a person’s head. For me, any story that stays with you as much as this one does is certainly a successful one. In this story we follow the lives of Luke and Deborah. Deborah has a loving and devoted husband and young children who love their caring mummy very much. She has the perfect life and thinks about it all the time. Laying in her bed, she can hear the merry whistling of the tune ‘You are my sunshine’ from a couple of rooms away. Then reality kicks in. The happy thought of her perfect life is sucked swiftly from her mind and vomit starts to rise in her throat. The person whistling is not her husband, nor her child, but if she is to have any hope of seeing them again, she must continue to pretend. Through the searing pain below and gritted teeth, she manages a fake smile, and luckily, this time, her tears go unnoticed. Luke has not seen his wife, Deborah, in 4 years and is starting to lose hope. He desperately wants to move on for the sake of their children, but he can’t quite shift the niggling feeling that the wife he loves is still out there somewhere, with the desire to come home to him. Despite some people saying that she left him and that he has to move on, he won’t let this feeling go. After these 4 years of silence, without a trace of Deborah anywhere, a baby is found in a doorway in town. This baby is the first piece of evidence that Deborah is still alive and out there somewhere. It is her baby, and she somehow managed to get it there for someone to find as a signal for help. Now the police and Luke must start their investigation again, right at the beginning. Despite this glimmer of hope, every question from before still remains unanswered: what happened on the night of when she went missing? Who, if anyone, was involved in her disappearance? Why did no one see anything? And, most importantly, where is Deborah? But now the plot has thickened with even more questions to answer: where did her baby come from? How did she get it there? Why would she take her baby there rather than coming home? In this book, the reader is kept at the very edge of their seat as they observe two sides of the same story, from Deborah’s enclosed perspective, where tiny slithers of information are given from the subtleties that her senses struggle to pick up, and from the outside perspective of Luke and the police, where everything is a blank slate. It is apparent that every place where there was a vast lack of clues before, are the only places that could possibly provide any clues to solving this mystery. The reader follows all these characters in their fight for the truth in this gripping and exciting story, with new twists and turns around every corner and new motives being uncovered bit by bit. As well as experiencing this engaging crime drama plot, the reader is also made to contemplate the psychological effects of obsession and the actions that it has the power to make someone carry out. The reader is left captivated by this thought and questioning what things are going on in other people’s heads, particularly in those people who we know and who we see everyday. We are even left wondering: what lengths would I go to in order to feed my life-consuming obsession?