For a few pages at the beginning I ummed and ahhed over whether to put this down and put it on the “going straight back to the library” pile. After that I struggled to put it down at all. It was a completely captivating read.

The narrator is Tina, a girl from the Fens who ends up working at a prestigious American university. She’s researching seahorses, which isn’t really essential to the plot, but the detail adds a depth to the book. Coming home to England for her brother’s wedding she digs into her own thirty year old memories of being ten years old when one of her best friends went missing.

It’s coincidental to the plot that the area Tina returns to is in the midst of searching for two missing girls in a real life story. The reference is obvious and I’m not sure why the author doesn’t make it explicit. Coincidental to the plot, but not to the book.

The author did a fabulous job of constructing the layers of the story and gradually stripping them back. It was all very believable, the cultural references nearly all seemed bang on, and I can’t find much to fault about it. Great stuff.