She was dead even before I became aware of her existence . . . A child has been abducted from a sleepy Kent village, her face plastered across the media. As the crime unleashes a wave of hysteria, the claustrophobic world of Rowan Anderson and his inscrutable wife begins to disintegrate. Consumed by her macabre fixation, Cressida is determined to save their sickly daughter, Mary Rose, from the same fate – and perhaps even from Rowan himself. With caustic wit and pitch-black brilliance, Caroline Blackwood creates a skin-crawling – and utterly compulsive – story of repressed violence, female rage, and maternal obsession.
