Hardback: 530 pages
Genre: Crime Thriller
Publisher: Simon and Schuster 2024
Source: Tywyn Public Library
First Sentences: Thirty years ago, in a village in East Anglia where the land is swallowed up by mudflats and marshes and a hard wind blows in from the sea, a woman went missing.
Setting: East Anglia, England
Review Quote: 'As well as a fantastic mystery, Nicci French has written a powerful, moving and wise story about the damage that loss does to families, with characters you can’t forget. I loved it' Jo Callaghan
My Opinion: I have been aware of the married couple Nicci Gerard and Sean French who write together as Nicci French for a long time. However this is the first time I have read one of their novels. Probably because crime thrillers are not a genre I read very often, but this one caught my attention recently at the library. The blurb appealed and home it came with me!
The Salter family are celebrating their father Alec’s 50th Birthday with a party. The children Etty, Niall, Paul and Ollie are devastated when their mother Charlotte fails to put in an appearance. She was thought to be on her way and her no show is very out of character. As the hours then the days go by, it seems she has disappeared without trace. The police investigation at the time is unsuccessful and it three decades later that any real progress is made. The story of the investigation unfolds at a pace that kept me engrossed.
This emotional and complex novel is recommended to all fans of crime thrillers.
Précis Courtesy of Goodreads:
She’s loved by all who meet her. But someone wants her gone . . .
Then
When beautiful and vivacious Charlotte Salter fails to turn up to her husband Alec’s 50th birthday party, her kids are worried, but Alec is not. As the days pass and there’s still no word from Charlie, her daughter, Etty, and her sons, Niall, Paul and Ollie, all struggle to come to terms with her disappearance.
How can anyone just vanish without a trace?
Left with no answers and in limbo, the Salter children try and go on with their lives, all the while thinking that their mother’s killer is potentially very close to home.
Now
After years away, Etty returns home to the small East Anglian village where she grew up to help move her father into a care home. Now in his eighties, Alec has dementia and often mistakes his daughter for her mother.
Etty is a changed woman from the trouble-free girl she was when Charlie was still around - all the Salter children have spent decades running and hiding from their mother’s disappearance.
But when their childhood friends, Greg and Morgen Ackerley, decide to do a podcast about Charlotte’s disappearance, it seems like the town’s buried secrets – and the Salters’ – might finally come to light.
After all this time, will they finally find out what really happened to Charlotte Salter?
Author Profile:
Photo Courtesy of Amazon
Note: (Nicci Gerrard and Sean French also write separately.)
Nicci Gerrard was born in June 1958 in Worcestershire. After graduating with a first class honours degree in English Literature from Oxford University, she began her first job, working with emotionally disturbed children in Sheffield. In that same year she married journalist Colin Hughes.
In the early eighties she taught English Literature in Sheffield, London and Los Angeles, but moved into publishing in 1985 with the launch of Women's Review, a magazine for women on art, literature and female issues. In 1987 Nicci had a son, Edgar, followed by a daughter, Anna, in 1988, but a year later her marriage to Colin Hughes broke down.
In 1989 she became acting literary editor at the New Statesman, before moving to the Observer, where she was deputy literary editor for five years, and then a feature writer and executive editor. It was while she was at the New Statesman that she met Sean French.
Sean French was born in May 1959 in Bristol, to a British father and Swedish mother. He too studied English Literature at Oxford University at the same time as Nicci, also graduating with a first class degree, but their paths didn't cross until 1990. In 1981 he won Vogue magazine's Writing Talent Contest, and from 1981 to 1986 he was their theatre critic. During that time he also worked at the Sunday Times as deputy literary editor and television critic, and was the film critic for Marie Claire and deputy editor of New Society.
Sean and Nicci were married in Hackney in October 1990. Their daughters, Hadley and Molly, were born in 1991 and 1993.
In 1995 Nicci and Sean began work on their first joint novel and adopted the pseudonym of Nicci French.
Photographs, Trailer and Biographical Information courtesy of the following sites:
Amazon Author Profile. Goodreads Author Profile. Twitter Profile
