Little Boy Lost

Ten-year-old Jacob Rossi goes missing one afternoon during the short walk from his school. A few days later, DCI Anna Tate is called to the scene of a burned-out building, where the body of a boy has been found in the basement. The label in his school blazer reads ‘J Rossi’. As Anna investigates further, she learns that Jacob’s father, a well-known TV personality, has plenty of enemies. But would any of them go so far as to murder his young son?

While Anna is trying to discover who kidnapped Jacob Rossi, London is burning in a city-wide riot, triggered by the accidental shooting of a pregnant woman by a police officer during a raid. Although this particular London riot is fictional, the book makes frequent references to the real-life London riots of 2011, also triggered by a police shooting. The rioting is the backdrop for the secondary storyline in the novel, in which Anna’s daughter Chloe is left wandering alone and vulnerable while the riots are going on, with no way of contacting her mother.

This is the third book in the Anna Tate series. Although the novel more or less stands alone, there is a lot of backstory that is rather hard to follow and it’s probably better to read the series from the beginning. Having not read the earlier novels, I gleaned from this one that in the last book Anna had been reunited with her daughter, who had been kidnapped as a toddler by her father. The explanation of Chloe’s recent history and how she came to be reunited with her mother is probably a lot less confusing to someone who has read the earlier books.

The two separate plots make this a rather dense read. Established fans of the Anna Tate books will find this latest novel a gripping edition to the series. Fans of the police procedural crime thriller, especially those set in London, will find much to like in this story, and an engaging heroine in Anna Tate, and will probably want to explore the earlier books in the series to gain a full appreciation of it.