THE GIRL IN THE BOX BY SHEILA DALTON

Two women must overcome a shared tragedy. A mute Mayan girl held captive in a crate in the Guatemalan jungle, a bigcity psychoanalyst with a rescue complex, and a journalist with a broken heart are the characters in Dalton's second literary novel. 

In places, this book has a surreal quality, though the issues, civil war in Guatemala, Mayan genocide, and professional misconduct among big city psychoanalystsare real and gritty. The themes range from the clash of cultures to the many forms love can take, and how we confuse and abuse them. The Girl in the Box is a psychological drama of the highest order and a gripping tale of intrigue and passion.

To be totally honest I was unsure as to how I would get on with this book, but I was almost instantly drawn in to the mystery of the tragic life of Inez. Jerry is on a trip, a journey of discovery, however what he actually discovers ends up changing his life forever and ultimately leads to his death.
I am trying not to give away spoilers as such but I will say things are not always as they seem in the book. People are also not always what they seem either. Jerry's death ends up turning the journalist love of his life Caitlin into a type of detective. The first thing Caitlin has to do is accept the death of her lover. Next she has to slowly piece together what she knows, and what information she can glean from others until all the pieces fall into place. During her fact finding she comes up against officials some corrupt,others that turn a blind eye and those who are true to their professions as jerry had been to his very end. I couldn't help but love the character of Inez and when you learn her full story your heart breaks for her, she has seen so much and been through so much in her relatively short life. Its such a shame she start out being locked in a box and ends up being "locked up" again, though in different circumstances. I wish to thank Sheila for sharing this book with me, and her instinctively knowing even before I did myself that I would enjoy this book immensely. I truly wondered at the end of the book if this was actually a true story?

Available Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk £14.39 in paperback and £4.59 on Kindle. Also available as an ebook from google books Canada & US http://books.google.ca/ebooks?id=tq4igPq...