Strange Sally Diamond by Liz Nugent

 

Sally's dad always said, 'When I die, just put me out with the trash'.  So that's what Sally did, incinerating him in the burn barrel in the barn.  But it turns out, that's not what one does when your parent dies.  The police are called and Sally is in the news.  Everyone wonders about her anyway as she lives out in the country and doesn't socialize with anyone in town.  She has lived there for years with her father.

As things emerge, Sally learns the truth about her life.  She was the daughter of a man who kidnapped her mother at age eleven and kept her imprisoned for fourteen years.  When they were rescued, Sally was five and while her mother never recovered, Sally was adopted by the doctors who were given her care in the hospital.  They kept her apart and never really socialized her into the village life.  

But things are changing.  Sally slowly starts to make friends.  She enters psychiatric counseling and she slowly starts to integrate into society.  She also makes other discoveries.  She has relatives she has never met.  One is her uncle Mark who becomes a friend and someone to guide her along with the village doctor and her counselor  But Sally worries that the man who kidnapped her mother might still be alive and now might know where she is.  

Liz Nugent is an Irish writer whose work falls into the crime genre although her work is not the typical murder mystery.  Readers will be interested in Sally and her attempts to integrate into society after a life that was stunted for three decades, first by her captor and then by her family.  There is tension as the story of the man who is her birth father is revealed and what his life was like after Sally and her mother were discovered.  This book is recommended for crime and literary fiction readers.