Missing, presumed by Susie Steiner – a review

I was given a copy of this via netgalley.

A young woman called Edith goes missing. Her father is a well-respected surgeon so the authorities quickly take an interest in her whereabouts. Detective Manon spends her evenings listening to the police radio chatter in order to fall asleep. When she hears the case break over the radio, she knows it will be career defining and jumps to investigate.  Edith has had a complicated love life and of course this is what the police focus on, whilst the family are getting more and more desperate for news.

I quite enjoyed this book, although I wasn’t blown away with by it. The main problem for me was that Detective Manon was just annoying. She was single, and this fact seemed to be the main feature of her character. When she wasn’t crying in the toilets about her lack of man, she was going on internet dates that no matter how badly they got on she always invited home. This just seemed at odds with the idea of a smart clever important detective.

The other bit that really annoyed me is hard to explain without giving the plot away but I just found the actions of one of the characters to be completely unbelievable. I’ll leave it at that.

However saying that, despite finding the characters annoying the story itself was interesting. The twists and turns kept coming and I wanted to know what was going to happen.  The writing itself is good, and I found that keeping up with the changing characters points of view was easy as each character was written quite individually. The book is set in Cambridgeshire, and it took me a little while to get my head around the fact that the Deeping they kept going on about was actually the name of their holiday home, they weren’t talking about my old school. Yet putting all the misgivings aside, this book was interesting. It is obviously the start of a series and I will certainly give the next installment a go, I just hope that Manon becomes less Bridget Jones and more Kay Scarpetta by then.