The Farm

Reviewed By  Janet Mawdesley       April 3, 2014

 

Author  Tom Rob Smith

Distributor:     
ISBN:                 978-1-84737-570-4
Publisher:         Simon & Schuster
Release Date:    

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Who do you believe when you mother rings you to say your father is trying to get her committed and he is not to be trusted. He is telling lies and she is not mad, she is the one who is being wronged.

Then your father rings to tell you that if your mother rings you should not believe what she has to say as she is ill; she has been imagining things and these things are so very, very wrong.

Daniel loves both his parents but has been hiding a secret from them for the past few years. This has prevented him for going to visit them in their new home in Sweden, the farm they have always apparently wanted to have; the farm that is the next step in their life journey together; the farm in the land of his mother.

When he gets this series of distressing phone calls, followed by his mother arriving in London he is plunged into an world where the truth is a far reaching thing and he is going to have to decide who is telling it, his mother or father and if the tales his mother is telling are to be believed, where does this leave him, in relation to what his father is also saying.

As the information his mother tells him involves her childhood home of Sweden, the people she and his father had begun to build friendships with and his estranged Grandfather, Daniel begins to believe that whatever the truth is, it does not lie in England but in Sweden.

He decides the only way to discover what has caused both his parents to become so distressed needs to be discovered and dealt with. By taking this step he begins to undercover the chilling truth of his mother’s early life, opening up the extraordinary lengths a small community will go to in order to bury the past.

Superbly created and written, this crime in two stories is as complex as it is compelling and uses the nuances of the mind to take you to the edge of a psychological crime that will challenge you to the very surprising last page.