Pages: 389
Published: 25th February 2025
Genre: Domestic Thriller
It is June 21st, the longest day of the year, and new mother Camilla’s life is about to change forever. After months of maternity leave, she will drop her infant daughter off at daycare for the first time and return to her job as a literary agent. Finally. But, when she wakes, her husband Luke isn’t there, and in his place is a cryptic note.
Then it starts. Breaking news: there’s a hostage situation developing in London. The police arrive, and tell her Luke is involved. But he isn’t a hostage. Her husband – doting father, eternal optimist – is the gunman.
What she does next is crucial. Because only she knows what the note he left behind that morning says…
This is a book where the most dramatic and intense moments take place in the opening few chapters, presenting us with a tantalising scenario and a mystery that proceeds to swing this way and that until it unfurls delightfully before our eyes. Well crafted and intelligently put together, it is a thriller that simmers with intrigue throughout and never leaves you short of a theory or three.
The inventiveness of Gillian McAllister is on show again here, as she dreams up another original and enticing concept that immediately catches the eye, making us strap ourselves in for something beyond the humdrum. And while she perhaps tried to be a little too clever with the plot in her previous novel Just Another Missing Person, this definitely counts as a return to form.
Such is the tension and high stakes of what unfolds at the beginning, it leaves us holding our breath in nervous anticipation of what might happen next, and the way that the two main characters’ perspectives are written perfectly capture the gravity of the scene. You cannot help but put yourself in the shoes of Camilla in particular, and wonder at the horror of what it must be like to see your husband committing a serious crime that is making national headline news.
It is dark and unpredictable, and at this stage all we can assume is that Luke has been leading a double life and is not the man Camilla thought he was, but as we find out there are so many layers to that. The fun comes in unpeeling each one, as we follow Camilla and the hostage negotiator Niall into the later timeline where they are still following the loose ends having had their lives upended since that day.
Luke might be elusive, but there are events and clues that both characters can latch on to – as can the reader. The mystery keeps us interested, and the character development is strong too as we see both Camilla and Niall struggle to move on. Even as they work in the same jobs as before and Camilla’s daughter Polly is seven years older, a part of them that was there before seems tangibly missing.
You could say that some of the twists and perhaps even the resolution are not a huge surprise, yet the ride to getting there is a gripping one. There are some extremely clever touches like the cryptic notes and the coordinates, and none more than the manuscript that slots a lot of the pieces into place. The only element that does not feel satisfactorily answered is the identities of the two hostages.
Camilla is a likeable character by virtue of her sheer determination to understand what happened. As mentioned already, just to imagine being in her situation helps you connect with the story and how inexplicable everything is to her. In terms of Niall, he goes from someone who feels in control and self-assured to finding himself questioning his judgment, leading him to become quite blasé about following instructions. To be fair, it is this defiance that makes us root for him too.
Despite what might seem an unusual plot structure, the pacing is strong, keeping the new strands coming after we move forward into the later timeline. The writing is powerful too, never losing its sense of urgency and also giving the characters quirky personality traits such as Luke and Camilla’s made-up words. There was one minor but surprising mistake for an author with McAllister’s usually excellent attention to detail, and that is mentioning Tik Tok in the earlier timeline when it was not available in the UK until late 2017.
Overall, we have an ambitious concept that provides us with an opening third of the book that is hard to tear our eyes away from, followed by a mystery that takes us to lots of interesting places. While it is plot driven for the most part, the characters do leave more than a mark and it is partly thanks to how well they are drawn that we are kept invested until the end.
A terrific book that again showcases why Gillian McAllister is an outstanding domestic thriller and mystery author. The way the plot unravels is very clever indeed and we are seriously made to put ourselves in the main character’s shoes.
My rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Stephen Reads Books 