Pages: 337
Published: 20th May 2025
Genre: Crime
Content warnings: References to child abuse, injury detail, missing child storyline
When Nick Vincent, producer of true-crime show Infamous, hears about an explosive new angle on a high-profile case—the 2016 murder of an eight-year-old girl in Oxford – he leaps at the chance to send a researcher to verify the claims.
Two months later, a dog walker discovers a woman’s body, bound and buried in a shallow grave in the woods. Forensic evidence links the corpse to the disappearance of that same child.
DCI Adam Fawley, the original investigating officer, is called in to run the enquiry. And he remembers the case well—he arrested the child’s mother for murder. A murder he now knows she didn’t commit.
The investigation raises more questions than answers. What connects the two crimes? Where has the dead girl been all these years? How did she manage to disappear? For Adam Fawley, this is personal…
If you have a long-running series and are looking for some inspiration to excite a devoted fanbase, then one way to capture their attention is to look into the past and pick up a thread that was left dangling, as if that were the plan all along. That is the approach Cara Hunter seems to have taken here, as the DI Adam Fawley series revisits its very first case and serve us with a tantalising premise that yields decidedly mixed results.
The idea of resuming the story of the missing child Daisy Mason is also a conveniently smart way of moving the series back into the present day, with all six previous instalments having been set in 2018, the year book one was published. Six years on and a few things have changed including a couple of new characters being introduced, but all of the old cast are still around in some capacity.
This book contains everything that makes the series – and Hunter’s work as a whole – such a success. It is unfailingly a page turner; it reads so quickly and provides us with such a fascinating case full of interesting variables that we cannot resist continuing to find out what developments it has in store for us next. There is the laidback humour, and of course nothing here would be complete without all the many types of multimedia, from interview transcripts to visual timelines.
Despite that, more time is devoted to DI Fawley’s first person narrative than in perhaps any other book in the series to date. He has been promoted, but having been called in to reinvestigate his old case we see a more rounded protagonist with a little more humility and open-mindedness, and you can absolutely see in the writing how much of a positive impact fatherhood has had on him. The same could be said about his relationship with his wife Alex, which is one of the real highlights in terms of character moments.
The plot is as gripping as ever, yet it is also the weakest in the series so far. On the one hand, revisiting characters such as Daisy’s family members offers strong development and truly explores the long-term consequences of what happened, especially her brother Leo whose sad upbringing touched so many nerves in the first book. However, Daisy’s story just comes across as a bit too sensational to be taken very seriously.
For all the excellent attention to detail given the intricacy of the mystery, there is also way too much exposition. The multimedia that has been such a defining strength of this series here becomes a weakness courtesy of the shadow journal, a set of diary entries where Daisy responds to various prompts. These sections were poorly written, not at all believable, and seemed to be there entirely for the reader’s benefit. Surely there must have been a better way to fill in some of the gaps in the timeline.
At least there was an intriguing ending which leaves the door open for more, with cryptic warnings and just the right amount of menace to make you feel unsettled yet wanting more as you turn the final page. And of course, Hunter does not waste the opportunity to include Infamous, the fictional true crime show she created for the previous instalment and is now a constant presence in her books – indeed the scenes of Robin researching Daisy’s case were the ones that really had me on the edge of my seat.
Just like Fawley, many of the other characters have come a long way during the six-year gap but remain familiar to anyone who has read the series from the beginning. Quinn in particular has settled down and is much more mature, there is a greater assertiveness about Everett and the stoic Asante, while it would have been nice to see more of Somer. As always, the new members of the team are given a strong sense of personality, with the inquisitive Stilwell particularly likeable.
As this one revisits the same case as the first book it is hard to suggest that it could be read as a standalone, although Hunter does her very best. She deserves points for the recap about all the characters at the beginning, and it was also nice to get a lengthy author’s note at the end explaining the basis for this novel. Nevertheless, any new readers will have no problem getting into her writing style, which is so easy-going amid all the details of the mystery.
Overall, you will have absolutely no problem flying through this book. The way the series is structured basically makes us obliged to keep reading on, and revisiting Daisy was an irresistible hook that has us invested immediately. The quality this time around was somewhat undermined by the ill-conceived shadow journal and some might say Infamous is getting a little too prominent, but the plot has its fair share of high points too.
This was a perfectly gripping mystery which resurrects the first case we ever encountered in this series. I enjoyed it, but not as much as some of the previous books and the shadow journal took a star off my rating.
And just another point, Cara Hunter switched to a new publisher since Hope To Die, which means the artwork for this book is different compared to the rest. Not a big deal, but it does like slightly odd on my bookcase against the rest of the series!
My rating: ⭐⭐⭐
