The Girl They All Forgot

Life is certainly nasty, brutish, and short—at least for most of the characters in Edwards’s much-awaited new installment, set on the edge of England’s Lake District. DVI Hannah Scarlett is in charge of cold cases, and she’s actually been funded well enough to put together a small team. Here she’s investigating the disappearance of a young woman, Ramona Smith, who is presumed to have been murdered 21 years ago. The case gets noticed when a young man commits suicide by running into quicksand—at the exact location and date that his father, who was acquitted of Ramona’s murder, took his life. The search for Ramona takes Hannah and colleagues through quite a number of plot lines with quite an assortment of characters, one creepier than the last: a sexually repressed antiques dealer, an over-the-top toy boy, a sexy—but completely plastic—middle-aged woman, and so many more. What’s remarkable is how intertwined the characters are; even Hannah’s personal life comes into play. As Hannah digs deeper into the evidence of the past, and confronts the present, readers have the pleasure of seeing such a complex narrative effortlessly resolve itself. For readers of Ann Cleeves, Mark Billingham, and Clare Donoghue.