Darling Mine

Romy Hausmann

CAN there be anything worse for a parent than finding that a beloved child has gone missing… and then facing the rest of your life not knowing for sure what happened to them?

Five years after she thrilled and chilled readers with her sensational bestselling novel Dear Child – which became a major Netflix series – German author Romy Hausmann (pictured below) returns with another exceptional page-turner exploring the trauma of loss, its impact on a broken family, and the devastation of dementia.

Seamlessly translated into English by Jamie Bulloch, Darling Mine is a powder keg of emotional intensity as this soul-searching writer peers deep into the human psyche for a riveting, multi-layered mystery full of angst and intrigue, and with a classic unreliable narrator leading us through more twists and turns than a snakes and ladders board. It is twenty years since 16-year-old Julie Nowak went missing. Her disappearance broke her family and shattered their comfortable lives in Berlin where Julie’s father, Theo Nowak, was a renowned thoracic and vascular surgeon at the famous Charité Hospital, and her mother Vera, a former teacher.

Since then a broken-hearted Vera has died, Julie’s younger sister Sophia has married, and 74-year-old Theo, who is descending into the stultifying shadows of dementia, has found his world now consists of disorder, anger and the ‘yellow stickers’ which are left as reminders on his fridge and other places by Sophia.

Everyone seems to have given up on finding Julie… except Theo. So when he is contacted by true crimes podcasters Liv Keller and her partner Philipp Hendricks on the twentieth anniversary of Julie’s disappearance, he is determined to make one last effort to find out what happened to her. Liv has come across a new lead and she wants to put the case back in the public eye but Julie’s sister Sophia doesn’t want unhappy events being dug up again. Theo, meanwhile, is willing to get involved to find out the truth but he knows he must be quick before his dementia completely overtakes him.

There are so many questions still left answered… who abducted Julie and why does her ex-boyfriend Daniel, a man who was six years older than her, keep his mother’s bedroom door locked years after she passed away? As the past is revisited, will the mystery of missing Julie finally be resolved? 

Chief editor at a film production company in Munich at the age of just twenty-four, Hausmann uses all her gifts of suspense and drama to create a psychological thriller full of jaw-dropping revelations, hidden deceptions, and a palpable sense of urgency driven by the imperative of Theo’s increasing confusion and ever-advancing dementia. Two decades of uncertainty over what happened to Julie have festered in the Nowak family and the new investigation into her disappearance has exposed the fault lines in both her family and those who knew her, reigniting a simmering anger, a pervasive sense of guilt, and Theo’s desperate determination to dig out the truth.

The result is a highly-charged and complex mystery littered with red herrings, layer after layer of chilling secrets, and a cast of deeply unlikable and suspicious characters, each with their own hidden agenda. With a devastating darkness at its heart, and a plot which is so deliciously twisted that it will leave you gasping, Darling Mine is an unmissable, mind-blowing journey as disturbing as it is compelling.
(Quercus, hardback, £22)