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.

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?

'Classic Nicci French: an unputdownable missing-persons thriller that’s also a searing examination of family, memory and grief. A big-skied, full-blooded, broken-hearted book' Erin Kelly

'One of their very best. Compelling, moving and beautifully written . . .  an absolute winner' Observer

'Fantastic - a breathless drumbeat of dread and suspense . . . no one does it better than Nicci French' Lee Child