The Daughter

Evie Wingfield and her mother, Lauren, are your typical mother-daughter pair, bickering at times but with a deep love underneath. Lauren is hoping that Evie’s Christmas break from her London law studies will provide time for them to relax and get past the teenage moodiness, but when she arrives at the dorms to pick Evie up, she’s not there. The sleepy young man who answers the dorm door swears that this has been his place for months, and the school’s security can’t (or won’t?) provide answers. At once, the reader is dropped into Lauren’s nightmare. Nobody will take Evie’s disappearance seriously enough, and Lauren and her young son, Lucas, a secondary character who might be the novel’s strongest, in effect start their own police procedural. What follows is one of the most exciting stories I’ve read in some time, and definitely with one of the most startling ending twists. After this, you’ll want to try Logan’s previous works, The Mother and The Holiday.—Henrietta Thornton