Thank you to NetGalley and Harlequin (Australia), MIRA for an advance copy of this ebook in exchange for an honest review.

As a fan of psychological thrillers, suspense and mystery I was looking forward to reading this book, hoping it wasn't the same old story of where a woman wakes to find she forgot what happened and we as the reader must travel along to figure out "What happened?"
Well, I was not disappointed! This book started under a completely new premise. While in police custody our main character claims to be a girl that has been missing for 10 years due to her canny resemblance. Crazy enough she passes and is brought back to Rebecca Winter's house where she is quickly accepted by "Bec's" family and old friends. Growing up without a perfect family our MC is happy to live in place of the missing girl, until she starts to receive warning messages on her cell phone. Quickly secrets are unfolding and maybe pretending to be Bec Winters isn't really the perfect place.

Super suspenseful surprise! I really enjoyed this fresh take on a missing girl and unsolving a cold case, No more details because I don't like to reveal spoilers , so read this one!
Recommended for fans of mystery , thrillers, and psychological suspense!

Only Daughter is a debut thriller that tells the story of a girl going missing and one day she walks into a police station claiming to be Bec Winters, missing for over a decade.
It has everything a good solid thriller should contain, unreliable narrators, great characterisation, a well-thought-out plot, some fab sub-themes, and is so pacey it took me only one day to read.
Some excellent twists and turns that kept me reading as well.
Thanks to NetGalley for the book to write this review.

4.25 stars!
I have been in a bit of a University-assignment-induced Reading slump lately, but now I have a few weeks to binge on as many books as I can! So I started with some neglected netgalley books I haven’t had a chance to get to yet.

I started Only Daughter, totally forgetting the premise and why I had requested it in the first place, and quickly got sucked into the plot and writing even before I remembered that Snoekstra is an AUSTRALIAN author! Yes! An Aussie thriller! Set in Canberra no less - I don’t live in our nations capital personally, but I love it and have family and friends there.

Our nameless protagonist is caught doing something naughty and in desperation, pretends to be Rebecca, a missing girl from Canberra that she already knows she bears a striking resemblance to from seeing missing persons reports. She has been missing for years, so she thinks surely she will be able to pull off a bit of an act to ditch the cops and get away! But she soon finds herself in Canberra, and in Rebecca’s shoes, literally. Will they realise she isn’t who she says she is? And whoever took/killed Rebecca is not happy that she is suddenly back...

What a bloody great read! If it not for the occasional Aussie reference and setting, I would have thought I was reading some international best selling thriller from the states (Can you tell I have a soft spot for good American thrillers?). I got so completely sucked into the story. Yes unbelievable, but so good it didn’t even matter! And everything just falls into place I thought it was fantastic! I KINDA saw the twist, KINDA, but not really... so that’s mega points from me!

I really loved how it went back in forth in time between or pseudo Rebecca, and the events of real Rebecca. It felt like a web intricately trapping the climax and twist of the story.

The only let down for me was the ending. Not the twist, but the way it ended. I thought it was ok, but could have had a bit more oomph. It was slightly too abrupt for my liking.

Would I recommend Only Daughter?

Yup it ticked all of my boxes. Great writing, a bit of romance, lots of thrills, a killer mystery, and was so addictive I preferred it over sleep! Would have been a higher rating from me if it weren’t for the ending.

Many thanks to the author and publisher via netgalley for the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review.

I read this story, not in one sitting, but I had to keep making myself go back to it. I really liked the premise of the shoplifter finding a way out of her problems by claiming to be the missing teen, Rebecca Winter. I didn’t like that I couldn’t form a connection with the main character. We are given the story in two perspectives, that of the shoplifter and of the real Rebecca before she was kidnapped. At times the story told the same thing over and over again, and that’s when I put the book down. I can say that the ending was unexpected.

This story had me reading faster and faster, my heart racing to find out if this mystery was going to be pulled off.
The ending was even more of a shocker!
Can't help but enjoy this novel.
Read it!

Our narrator is picked up for shoplifting. Desperate for a way out, her mind recalls a missing person post in which the girl looked remarkably like her. She announces she is “Rebecca Winter” missing for 11 years. Her first thought is to get through this and then escape from police first chance she gets but then she thinks a nice loving family is just what she needs right now and surely she can pull off being Bec as she had been missing for so long. But the family is not quite what the fake Bec expected and what did happen to the real Rebecca Winter?

The story unfolds in dual timelines; that of our fake Bec (we never get to know her real name) in 2014 and also the real Bec in the lead up to her disappearance in 2003. All we know is Bec disappeared after a shift at McDonalds and I loved the way the author teased her readers along as Bec goes to work and then home each day,

A couple of things I didn’t like were; you needed to suspend belief a lot with the police procedural and the ways fake Bec tried to get out of being identified. Also the author has added in current events of the time to give the story a sense of time and place however they come across as contrived and unnatural.

All that aside, I couldn’t stop reading and although clichéd I did actually stay up late (really late!) until I finished this book. The mystery had me intrigued and I read the book with a gripping sense of dread.

This is a debut and yes it needs a bit of polishing but there is so much potential and I’m excited to see what Snoekstra will come up with next.

I received my copy from Harlequin Aus via Netgalley and chose to write a review.

3★
A case of from the frying pan into the fire. A girl escaping whatever it was she’s done at home is on the road, hungry, is caught shoplifting, and so grabs at the opportunity to impersonate a girl who disappeared 11 years ago from her Canberra home.

Her resemblance to Rebecca Winter, the missing girl, is so pronounced that even her boyfriend had commented when they saw the notice on TV.

Unfortunately, it seems she may have let herself in for more than she bargained for.

This girl tells the story in first-person.

“. . . a photograph came up on the screen. She had my nose, my eyes, my copper-coloured hair. Even my freckles.

‘Rebecca Winter finished her late shift at McDonald’s, in the inner north Canberra suburb of Manuka, on the 17th of January 2003, ‘ a man said in a dramatic voice over the photograph, ‘ but somewhere between her bus stop and home she disappeared, never to be seen again.’

‘Holy sh*t, is that you? Peter said. . . do you think that’s your long lost twin or what?’”

As she gradually infiltrates the family and friends, she gets more and more brave, always trying to guard against saying the wrong thing, but also trying to figure out what really did happen to Rebecca Winter. She refers to the parents always as “the mother” or “the father” and the twin brothers by their names.

I really appreciate that there is never any confusion in the reader’s mind whose story this is. The tone of the two girls' stories varies, and the change of the point of view is very effective.

Flashbacks to 2003 are Rebecca’s, told in third person. Bec and Lizzie are best friends, and Lizzie is the hardest to convince that Rebecca has indeed returned from possibly succumbing to the intense, deadly Canberra bushfires of that season.

The 11-year gap between the disappearance and the 2014 time of this girl's story help us believe that she might fool doctors, detectives and friends, but it’s still a pretty big ask.

The ending at first seems like what we might have expected but then turns out to be something else again – always fun!

Thanks to NetGalley and Harlequin for the preview copy from which I’ve quoted.