Tony R Cox is an ex-provincial UK journalist. The Simon Jardine series is based on his memories of the early 70s - the time of sex, drugs and rock 'n roll - when reporters relied on word of mouth and there was no internet, no mobile phones, not even a fax machine.
Charlotte Salter – Lottie – organises her husband’s 50th birthday party, and not only doesn’t turn up, but disappears without a trace. The local police believe she’s walked away and will walk back, and then they decide Lottie’s dead and and they have a prime suspect. But inevitably there’s a lot more to this fascinating and enthralling novel.
Lottie disappeared at Christmas 1990, thirty years later, Lottie’s family and her children’s friends return and the whole terrible saga is unearthed from ground that has remained undisturbed for three decades.
Etty, in 1990 the youngest of Lottie’s children, is now a metropolitan solicitor who is back in the quiet East Anglian village to prepare her father as he is moved to a dementia residence. Is Lottie alive and missing or dead and swept away into the North Sea?
This is so much more than a book about a disappearance. That is the central, intriguing mystery, but the lives of almost everyone who attended Alec Salter’s birthday party are unravelled, unveiling middle-aged people, and some elderly, who might have been involved in the missing, much loved woman, and who could be completely innocent, victims of other crimes, people who have committed other crimes over the years, or even responsible for Charlotte Salter’s disappearance.
The phrase ‘page turner’ is much over used, but this book encapsulates its true meaning. It is an un-put-downable examination of fascinating characters, each of whom could be our neighbours, our family, people we pass in the street without a second thought. Each is a fictional creation with a vice-like grip on reality.
Author Nicci French is, in fact, a wife and husband. Where two writers often have separate styles, this couple blend together to offer an uninterrupted flow that doesn’t waste words, but leaves fully rounded, almost three dimensions of places, people and their emotions.
