Life as a missing person is absolute murder…
When artist Eloise Ford hears that human remains found in an abandoned mine are believed to be those of long-missing teenager Elizabeth King, the shock sends her reeling.
It can’t be true. Eloise knows this for a fact because… she is Elizabeth King.
Now, her carefully curated life in Cornwall is falling apart. Her husband is acting strangely, her children aren’t speaking to her and she can’t sell a painting for love nor money. But much more worrying are the signs that someone knows exactly who she is… and why she had to vanish thirty years ago.
Eloise needs answers. Is her son’s ex-girlfriend just plain annoying… or does she know something? Will the detection skills of the online ‘Truth Seekers’ group prove more than amateurish? What’s the real story behind those village newcomers?
And just how far would she go to keep her family, her friends, and her fraudulent life, safe?
Born in Cyprus, Jo Jakeman worked for many years in the City of London before moving to Cornwall with her husband and twin boys. She is the author of One Bad Apple. Find out more at www.jojakeman.com
My thoughts: This was an interesting twist on the missing person trope in crime fiction. A body is found but it can’t be the person the police originally think because she’s alive and well and living under a different name.
So now, Eloise’s perfectly controlled perfect life – husband, two kids, dog, art gallery, yoga every week, is about to be upended. She needs to identify the body and work out who put the body there, before they find her, because it’s quite possible they want her dead too.
Her son’s on/off girlfriend Holly is into true crime and has joined a private chat room online that is keen to investigate the case too, and Holly has volunteered to look into things locally. She’s also rummaging through Eloise’s house and finds her own clues – including one that makes her believe someone in the house knows something.
After a rather eventful car ride from Sheffield back down to Cornwall, Eloise and Holly join forces to solve the case. But this requires them to trust each other.
Clever, funny, full of twists and turns, with two intriguing protagonists, who have to dig into Eloise’s history, one she hoped she’d left behind, to find out who is threatening her present.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for a review, but all opinions remain my own.
ramblingmads 