by Mick Herron
First published 2003
Sarah Tucker feels trapped in her dull marriage when a massive blast levels the house next door. A little girl vanishes in the chaos. Sarah fixates on finding the missing child, but her amateur investigation upends everything she believed about her world. Dead people turn out to be alive. Living people start dying. Her boring suburban existence in Oxford transforms into something dangerous and unpredictable. The search leads Sarah far from home to a bleak Scottish island. She travels with a former soldier who carries his own deadly secrets. Official enemies hunt him while mysterious forces seem to target Sarah herself. She discovers that deception runs deeper than she imagined. People she trusted have lied to her for years. Her marriage crumbles as she commits fully to the hunt for truth. The missing child becomes the key to a web of secrets that stretches from quiet English neighborhoods to remote northern landscapes.
Genres: suspense, mystery, thriller
Vibes: intimate, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: fish-out-of-water, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Oxford, Scotland
Period: 21st-century
317 pages · Hardcover · Constable
Content warnings: death