Where the Missing Go by Emma Rowley
Written in the first person Rowley delicately drives this tense and twisting novel through a situation that no parent wants to even consider. A missing child. Where are they? Have they been taken? Are they in pain? Are they alive? The protagonist, Kate volunteers at a missing persons helpline – for runaway youngsters to call with messages to be passed on to their loved ones, no questions asked. Those she receives are usually crank calls, but sometimes – like this one – a girl called Sophie calls to say she’s safe, and could her parents be contacted and told. But Sophie is Kate’s daughter, and is this really Sophie?
Obsession and love are the themes of this novel, which unravels a tangled knot but will the echoes ever go? Who knows.
Where the Missing Go by Emma Rowley. pub Orion. £7.99
Widows by Lynda La Plante
It is 35 years since the original release of Widows and what will the new generation think? Probably they’ll be as hooked as I was originally, with its cast of female perpetrators who ooze ‘make my day’ dynamism. No snowflakes here.
Enjoy Dolly Rawlins as she scythes through the darker side of life – with her pack, all of them set on completing their husbands’ unfinished task, that of raiding a security van. Unfinished because they were killed. However, only three bodies were found, and they realise there should have been four. Where is the survivor? Why did he survive?
Widows by Linda La Plante. pub Zaffre. pb £7.99
Can you Tolerate This? by Ashleigh Young
The winner of the Windham-Campbell Award for Non-Fiction has created a collection of essays that explore isolation, debilitating shyness, the limitations of the body and the challenges of personal transformation.
Young discusses her youth in New Zealand and expands her subject matter with the years as she develops, deepens, allowing her curiosity to enhance her observations of herself and the world around her. Young is also a poet, and it shows.
Can You Tolerate This. pub Bloomsbury. hb £14.99 please note publication 9th August 2018
Betty Church and the Suffolk Vampire by M.R.C. Kasasian
It’s September 1939 in Sackwater. Inspector Betty Church, one of the few female officers on the force has arrived to fill a vacancy. But for Betty it is familiar if unwelcome territory; the place she grew up in but thought she’d left forever.
I love this sort of book. Betty’s first incident is the case of the missing buttons, but things move on to a missing bench that actually reveals a missing body. Oh my word – there are two puncture wounds in his throat. Could it be the Suffolk Vampire? Or so the locals wonder. Betty has no truck with such nonsense and sets about hunting a real life present day murderer. Yay Betty.
Is this a rival for MC Beaton, my favourite of all time? We shall see.
Betty Church and the Suffolk Vampire. pub Head of Zeus. hb £18.99 Note: pub 12th July
Milly Adams is a Cornerstone author (Penguin Random House Group)