by Cara Hunter
First published 2025
DCI Adam Fawley thought he had solved the case six years ago. An eight-year-old girl murdered in Oxford, her mother arrested and convicted. Then a dog walker finds a woman's body in the woods, bound and buried in a shallow grave. Forensic evidence connects the corpse to that same child case from 2016. The dead girl Fawley believed was killed has been alive all these years. The mother he sent to prison is innocent. Nick Vincent, producer of the true-crime show Infamous, had been investigating an explosive new angle on the high-profile case when everything unraveled. Now Fawley must reopen the investigation that defined his career. Where has the girl been hiding? How did she vanish so completely? What links her disappearance to this fresh murder? For Fawley, every answer raises new questions about a case that has become deeply personal.
Genres: mystery, crime, thriller, detective
Vibes: dark, emotional, fast-paced, suspenseful
Tropes: enemies-to-lovers, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Oxford
Period: 2016, 2022
359 pages · Kindle Edition · Hemlock Press
Content warnings: death, murder