The longest day

As Hitchcock knew, the best thrillers use the very simplest materials to achieve their sinister purpose of enthralling and terrifying their audience. Nicci French’s previous novels have shown an impressive ability to dramatise the darkest concerns of her readers. Her latest book taps into the universal fear of parents: what do you do when your child goes missing? It sounds a simple formula, and it is. But getting it right is extraordinarily difficult.

Saturday 18 December is Nina Landry’s 40th birthday. She and her children — 15- year-old Charlotte and 12-year-old Jackson — are off to Florida for Christmas with Nina’s boyfriend. The Landrys live on Sandling Island off the Essex coast. On the morning of their departure, Charlotte has organised a surprise party for Nina. It’s not a success, partly because such parties rarely are, but mainly because Charlotte doesn’t turn up for it.

Nina plunges headlong into a maternal panic, which turns out to be entirely justified. Charlotte was last seen on her paper round earlier that morning. Someone has tried to confuse the time of her disappearance by collecting a selection of her belongings, perhaps during the doomed party. At a sleepover the previous evening Charlotte was given spiked drinks and bullied by little friends from hell. Nina contacts the police, whose slow and methodical investigation does little to assuage her increasingly manic desperation. She tries to reconstruct her daughter’s movements during the morning, and in doing so finds herself exploring the secret hinterland of Charlotte’s life.

One by one the carefully timed revelations emerge — a boyfriend, a one-night stand, a holiday acquaintance who has herself gone missing, and Charlotte’s oddly close relationship with her father, Nina’s former husband. Around them swirls a cast of characters who may or may not have something to do with Charlotte’s disappearance — a mechanically helpful vicar, a jealous woman GP, Nina’s ex-lover, a teacher with a Goth son and an alcoholic wife, and the estranged and possibly unbalanced husband himself.