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Jo Handley left her daughter outside a shop in her pushchair for only a minute or two, but it was long enough for tragedy to strike. When she went back outside her toddler had gone. Even when Lauren's pushchair was found at the base of some cliffs Jo refused to give up hope that her daughter was still alive. Eventually, Jo makes a new life for herself in the Lake District, running specialist tours all over the country with her husband, Marcus, but for years she has been receiving postcards, purporting to come from Lauren's kidnapper, holding out the tantalizing hope that Jo's daughter might still be alive. Marcus and the police believe the cards to be the work of a cruel hoaxer, but Jo can't simply dismiss them. When Jo receives yet another card, she starts to believe that the kidnapper might be close at hand, watching her and under that shadow, slowly but surely, the life Jo has built for herself starts to disintegrate. She feels she is being pushed out of the business in which she is a partner and bitterly regrets the merger with another firm, run by the glamorous Melissa, a woman she feels is getting closer to Marcus in more than a business sense. At the same time, Jo has to cope with the difficulties of integrating Sean, Marcus' teenage son, into their lives. Against a backdrop of mounting pressure, something has to break, and it looks increasingly likely that Jo will be that something. This is one of those rare books that gripped me from the outset. To lose a child to abduction has to be every parent's nightmare, but for Jo, the horror doesn't end there. Janes handles the background story skilfully as the details of Jo's past life. Her history unfolds gradually rather than being sprung on the reader all at once, but I never had that irritating feeling of nuggets of information being dangled just out of reach. The reader gets to know Jo as she sees herself and as others see her and as the book progresses even Jo comes to question how many of her own memories she can actually rely on, as all around her doubts start to pile up in the minds of others and inevitably spill over into how she sees herself. The Lakeland setting is vividly evoked and a scene where village struggle to unblock a culvert before the stream breaks its banks and floods their houses is particularly well drawn, bringing with it a fragile understanding between Jo and her stepson. Watching as Jo's life steadily unravels around her is a painful but riveting process and I was thoroughly caught up in both her life and the lives of everyone close to her. This is undoubtedly a book that will stick in my mind for a long time to come. § Linda Wilson is a writer, and retired solicitor, with an interest in archaeology and cave art, who now divides her time between England and France.
Reviewed by Linda Wilson, May 2011
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