When five year old Emma Burrows went missing from a small, Essex village in 1980 it was presumed she'd been taken by Jimmy McGill, a young man with learning difficulties. Neither were seen again.
Thirty-nine years later a journalist researching a book on missing persons starts asking questions about the case and five people involved in the lives of the two missing individuals are reluctantly thrust back into a past they thought they'd left behind.
Emma's family, her teacher and Jimmy's brother don't want to see their lives disrupted again. They have enough going on in the present without having to relive the past.
But perhaps they are linked. Maybe the cure for today's problems lies in facing up to the long-buried secrets and lies of almost forty years before. What really happened that day? How were two young people able to vanish from a quiet village? Who's ready to face up to the past? Who's ready to tell the truth?
Stuart Bone was born and raised in Essex, England. He spent twenty years working as an accountant in the London banking industry before giving it all up to concentrate full time on his writing career.
He started out writing humorous fiction and sets each of these books in his fictional county of Tenhamshire.
Stuart then branched out into mystery fiction. He continues to write in both genres and has seen his writing career go from strength to strength.
Having read Stuart Bone's other books, the humorous ones, this was sitting on my bookshelf for some time. Big error on my part as this was a cracking read, finished in two sittings. It's hard to review without giving much away, other than to say there are brilliantly written characters, backstories that intertwine and keep you reading through to the end.