Never Knowing by Chevy Stevens, Allen & Unwin, $23.99
Sara has never felt she really fitted in with her adoptive family. It’s not that she’s not loved or nurtured, just that she’s different and deep down believes she could never really match up to her parents’ birth children — her two sisters.
So in the build up to her wedding day it seems only natural that Sara would choose to seek out her own birth mother.
This is familiar territory — the misfit adoptee in search of maternal love and justification. But very very quickly, indeed with a whooshing twister of a whirlwind, author Chevy Stevens turns banal into terrifying.
By page 26 we learn that Sara’s mother was the only survivor of the Campsite Killer, who hunted and raped his young victims.
By page 27 we realise Sara’s father is almost certainly said serial killer and he’s still at large. And by page 52 the story’s gone viral with Sara, her birth mother and all her nearest and dearest suddenly in terrible danger.
The shock is instant and immediately sets a cracking pace for what follows as Sara grapples to get to know her mother and becomes caught in a game of cat and mouse with her father who appears to be desperate — pathologically — to get to know her.
She puts her trust in two detectives who have been working for years to nail her psychotic murdering father, and with the end in sight they put our heroine in more and more perilous situations and isolate her even further from her family.
Underlying all these sensational revelations is a more sophisticated subplot unpicking Sara’s perceived relationships with her family members, her husband to be, her daughter and these new trustees who are dictating Sara’s life.
This is a plot full of surprises and also laced with some fascinating human psychology, but above all what Chevy Stevens has achieved is a perfect un-put-down-able thriller shifting the sands of her story right up to the final page. Clear the weekend and start reading.
About the author
Chevy Stevens, 38, was born on Vancouver Island, Canada, where she lives now with husband Connel, but raised on a ranch where she spent most of her time “exploring the woods, or hiding somewhere reading a book with a cat or a dog for company,” she says.
Her father was a navy man, at sea for long stretches leaving her mum to run the ranch. Chevy knew she wanted to be a writer from a very young age but says it wasn’t until she was in her thirties that she felt she had a story to tell.
It was at this point that she quit her real estate job to write her debut novel Still Missing, a best seller which won the 2011 International Thriller of year Award for Best First Novel.
“Never Knowing was inspired by a conversation I had with my editor about what it might feel like if you were adopted to find out that your birth father was a murderer, who’d never been caught,” says Chevy.
Her next project is Always Watching and expands the character of Nadine, the psychiatrist who appears in her first two books.
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