The Forgotten Hours….

  This book was recommended to me by my Amazon Kindle settings and the following week popped up in one of my book reader clubs on Facebook. I had read posts by other readers and their excitement over getting the opportunity to read it and hoped it would be the next chance for me to lose myself in a great story. It begins with a young woman’s memory of a childhood summer spent at the family’s lake house with her best friend and her father.  The story describes the difficulty that the young woman, Katie, has with reconciling the father that she knew and loved and the father who was convicted of having sex with her 14 year old best friend.  Katie was sheltered from the evidence and testimonies produced at the trial and for the rest of her childhood and early adult life she harbored a resentment towards her former friend and an unwavering faith in her father’s innocence. However, she rarely shared her experiences with friends and even changed her last name in college to distance herself from the scandal. Katie had a budding relationship with an older man and wrestled with the need to tell him of her past before her father was released and showed up back in her life.  Things began to change when she started to get calls from news outlets and reporters wanting to know her thoughts on her father’s innocence.  His case received regional attention due her father’s impending release from prison and another similar case being tried at the time. Katie found herself wondering about the evidence in question and went on her own truth seeking quest to set the manner to rest in her mind.  The more she learned, the more she began to question everything which ultimately drove her to confront her father.  I liked the book and the determination that the main character demonstrated to find the truth even knowing it would likely cast a shadow on everything she knew about her family. The one thing I found a little distracting, though not enough to take away from the book, was the jumping from memories in the past to the present. There were a lot of flashbacks that were helpful to tie the story together but at times I found it slowed the story’s momentum. Regardless I found the book engaging and finished it in just a couple of days.  I rated it a four stars.