The discovery of the body of a young girl, who has been missing for 30 years, leads to the investigation of a cold that was a missing person but now is a murder
A cold case that is locked room mystery in a camp site full of teenage angst and jealousy.
The close-knit group of friends who were in their teenage years were experimenting in drugs, alcohol, and sex, are now in middle age and are scattered across the country having found various degrees of success in their lives
The promiscuity of one the older girls, Topez, leads to the camp becoming fragmented, but when the group get back together the next morning they find her young sister Aurora is missing.
30 years later DCI Jonah Sheens and his team are called in when the body is found. Sheens was a young uniform cop when the girl went missing and was at school with most of the people in the camp, so her remembers the case well.
But has he got more to hide? The girls in the group had been very promiscuous at school, and there is no doubt he knows at least one of them very well. So why is he keeping it a secret from his team. And can he keep it a secret without jeopardising the case.
Can you imagine being asked questions about what you were doing on a certain night 30 years ago. I suppose if it was on the night of such a traumatic event of a young friend going missing the answer would probably be yes.
But what if you had something to hide that night and had told lies, even if it wasn’t connected to the missing girl. Could you remember the lies?
This is the pretext of the plot, and Gytha Lodge uses is beautifully to spin a real labyrinth of a story.
It is a gripping story as Sheens tries to work out who is telling half-truths to cover for something innocuous after 30 years, and who is telling full blown lies, to hide the fact they are a murderer.
This is not a blood and guts thriller of a book. It is a slow burning cerebral book that gets the reader thinking.
It is not until the very end that all is revealed and what a reveal it is.
A thoroughly entertaining read that kept me hooked from start to finish.
Pages: 368
Publisher: Random House
Publish Date: 8thJanuary 2019
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