Great story!  I was engaged the entire time. A real page turner. Looking forward to reading more books from this author! Highly recommend!

This was such a good book. A teenager disappeared without a trace, but is she dead or alive.? There were lots of twists along the way, and a very exciting ending. I just kept wanting to read more.

I received an advance reader copy of this book to read in exchange for an honest review via netgalley and the publishers.

This book is about a teenage girl (Edie) who goes missing and the search for what has happened to her. 
The main protagonist's are Edies mother Samantha and Edies (then) boyfriend Williams wife - Frances.

Samantha has never given up hope of finding her daughter again and Frances becomes fascinated in the mystery of what happened to Edie when she comes to stay in the village with her husbands mother. 

This book pulled me in a few different directions - did she run away, was she abducted, is she alive or dead? I couldn't stop reading to find out what had happened to troubled Edie.

Tense. Full of suspense. Well paced and written. Twisty enough to keep you reading from the first page until the last. A definite must read.. Pick up this winner of a book. Happy reading!

Along with my love of the Investigation Discovery show, Disappeared, I am instantly drawn to any synopsis like this one - the mystery of a missing young woman. Edie, at fifteen, was a handful, raised along by her young single mother, Samantha. Though Samantha readily admits she's hardly a model mother, she loved her daughter, Her story comes in then and now segments, alongside Frances; story of an imperfect marriage. As their stories converge, they are drawn to one another. 

The plot progresses a little too slowly, and while it's easy to feel sympathy for both women, I never really felt connected to either one. The book relies too heavily on telling rather than showing and this only further slows the pace. I will say, the very end of the book does pick up the speed quite a bit and the plot does hold surprises, but they never really felt like the foundation was really there because the side characters are not very deeply developed. Still, the premise of Edie's disappearance drove me to continue on and though it wasn't the gripping read that I wanted it to be, but I never hated it either.

Edie Hudson was no angel, so when she goes missing, nobody really seems to care except for her mother, Samantha. 20 years after Edie disappeared, Samantha has still not given up hope in finding her daughter. One day she meets Frances, who just happens to now be married to William, the boy Edie had been dating when she disappeared. When Frances discovers a photo of her husband and Edie, she is intrigued by the story of this missing girl who nobody seems to miss. What happens next is a much too long, drawn out story that could have been so much better. 

The surprise twist ending, honestly didn't even surprise me, it was almost expected. I didn't care for any of the characters, they were all a bit uninteresting and dull. Not sure if this book was meant to be a thriller, nothing really seemed to happen til the end. Most of Samantha's chapters dealt with the past, but gave no real information or details into what may have happened to Edie. Frances' chapters were a tad more interesting, but it felt like the beginning really had nothing to do with the end of the book. 

I always appreciate when things wrap up at the end of a book and I'm not left hanging, so that was one thing this book did deliver on for the most part. 

Thank you to Netgalley and Amazon Publishing UK for the ARC of this book.

Samantha’s daughter Edie went missing 18 years ago. Edie was 15 years old troubled child. But did she not deserve to be found? For the neighbours and the authorities, the answer was yes. She was never found.
Frances is married to William and lives Swindon. They go to Lewes to look after Mimi, William’s mother, who had an accident. She meets Samantha and feels for her missing daughter. Frances feels drawn about Edie’s missing and starts asking questions. But some mysteries are better left buried because some of them are precious than life!

This is my first book by the author and I loved how she portrayed how as a society judge people based on their social and economic status. Edie’s disappearance did not raise any eyebrows. Even the police said “Girls like Edie… come back after some stint on road”. There was no help from the authorities or the neighbours.   

The author vividly painted the picture of a mother who lived in hope. She did not just lose her daughter but everything along with it. She appears distraught, lost friends and job. We can see a lot about Samantha but not so much about Frances.

The book is a slow burner. It takes time to build upon the story and the mystery.

The Missing is a dark tale of judgement, lies and being cocooned in hope forever only to drain the life force out you.

My rating 3.5 stars.

Thank you, NetGalley and Amazon Publishing for the arc in exchange for my honest review.

A really good read. I felt so sorry for Samantha the whole way through. I did not like Edie but I can empathise with Sam. The thought of your daughter going missing is unbearable. The twists in the plot were really well written and well thought out.

Thank you to Netgalley for my copy.

Two women thrown together over the disappearance of fifteen year old Edie, The Missing is quite a slow-burner to start with but picks up pace towards the end. 

Told from the perspective of both women from both then; when Edie first went missing, and now, The Missing is well written but I found it quite flat. It's not that I disliked it, I just didn't find it particularly enjoyable and I wasn't really intrigued as to what had happened to Edie. 

Single mum Samantha is a chain-smoking loner with her own anger issues making her account unreliable. She is clearly disillusioned against the truth of her daughter's behaviour and personality, trying time and time again to quiet the voice in her own head which tells her how she really felt about Edie and her disappearance. Her behaviour is erratic and obsessive as she claws for the truth. 

Frances has a past we don't really learn about in anything more than brief snippets of details or memories. There's no real explanation of her past and I didn't feel it really added much to her character. I felt like she was the character I liked the most but unfortunately her story isn't nearly as detailed as Samantha's. 

There are a few different "suspects" in this book and it feels very slow as Samantha works her way through each of them to try and figure out what people know. 

I wasn't a fan of the long chapters in this book. I personally felt quite frustrated to turn the page to a new chapter only for my kindle to tell me "time left in chapter: 52 minutes"! I think they made the book feel more of a slog and given the breaks in each chapter, could definitely have been chopped down to smaller chapters. The book is quite a heavy read with desperate, depressed Samantha's accounts taking up the majority of the book. 

Thank you to NetGalley, Daisy Pearce and Amazon Publishing UK for the eARC in exchange for an honest review.

Okay so uh-ho. this one is difficult to review. Because I wanted to like this so much buttttt.....

Sadly, I wasn't super impressed with this book. 
I thought it had great potential, but in the end I was left feeling highly underwhelmed. 
The writing was fine, however, the characters were so unlikable. Not unlikeable in that way where you still love them and kind of question yourself for doing so. 
They were just boring and flat. The story really fell short for me too. It just wasn't blowing me away at any point.

This one very clearly wasn't for me.

Thanks to NetGalley.

3.5 starw rounded up to 4

Fifteen year old Edie Hudson disappears without trace. It's now twenty years later and Samantha (Edie's mother) still does not know what happened to her daughter. Frances is interested in what happened to Edie. She discovered that her husband, William knew Edie. Thrntwomwomen accidentally meet and join forces to try and find out what happened to Edie.

The story is told from Samantha and Frances's perspectives. There seemed to be quite a lot of backstory at the beginning of the book but the more you read the more you understand why this was necessary. The story flips between then and now. I liked the friendship that developed between the two women. The ending was a surprise. There's some good twists to keep you interested. 

I would like to thank NetGalley,  Amazon Publishing UK and the author Daisy Pearce for my ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Marriages aren't always what they seem and neither are people. Who can you really trust? Who should you really trust? 

This book is told from two points of view: Frances, who seems to have a deeply troubled past and is married to William who "rescued" her although might be having an affair now, and Samantha, whose 15-year-old deeply troubled daughter vanished without a trace 20 years earlier. Frances and William are in his hometown because his mother, who lives with his closeted brother, has a severe fall, and while there, Frances discovers that William was dating Edie when she disappeared. Can Frances help Samantha finally get some answers after all these years of purgatory?

I really liked the friendship that develops between Frances and Samantha. It's nice to see a friendship between two women that isn't torn apart because of a relationship with a man or because of jealousy. I also really liked that there was just enough backstory for us to understand the motives of most of the characters even if we lack full explanations.

This was definitely a quick, fun read to start off the summer, although maybe not as heart-pumping suspenseful as it could have been for a thriller. I would have liked a bit more teasing out the whodunnit, since most (but not all) was easily guessed very early on.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with a copy of the arc. It has not influenced my opinion.

The Missing is told in two points of view. Samantha - the mother of Edie Hudson, a teenager who disappeared years before and Frances - a woman who becomes obsessed with solving the mystery of Edie’s disappearance. 

I felt like there was an awful lot of backstory at the beginning of this book. As I got further into the book, I understood why this was needed, however; it meant I found the book hard to get into.

The two points of view got confusing, especially at the start, I found it hard to remember which part was whose and it jolted me out of the story a lot. I also found it hard to distinguish between Samantha and Frances’s POV which got quite disorientating. 

I loved the friendship Frances and Samantha struck up. Samantha seemed like she’d been lonely for so long, as everyone around her insists that she just needs to move on from her daughter. Frances seemed to get that that wasn’t possible for her, that she couldn’t move on until she knew what happened to her daughter. 

The ending wasn’t much of a surprise - more of a ‘oh it all make sense now’ kind of ending. I wasn’t disappointed but neither was I crazy about it either. Saying that - the writing was what really shone about this book - lyrical and beautiful. It kept me reading until the end.

Frances opens a box of worms when she finds a photo of her husband William with Edie, a girl who went missing when she was 15.  Was Edie William's girlfriend?  What does he know?  That's the question not only for Frances but also for Samantha, Edie's mom who has never gotten over the loss of her daughter.  This goes back and forth in time and between Samantha and Frances, which adds to the story.  You, like me, might guess some of the answers these women seek but not all of them.  Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC.  A quick read.

I really loved this novel, I love the idea of writing about a cold case. I enjoyed the flashback from past to present and found it simple to keep up with great read!

Thank you netgalley and publishers for the opportunity to read The Missing in exchange for my honest review. 

This was a VERY good mystery. The author did a great job confusing the reader. This story is about a girl gone missing , and 20 years later had never been found. Is she dead? Did she run away? Who last saw her? These are all questions that we as the reader must ask ourselves. The story goes back and forth between two characters both past and present versions of themselves, which adds the the depth of the storyline.
Psychological thrillers always do a phenomenal job of misleading the reader over and over, and this story did just that. Her mother has been searching for her for twenty years with the hope that she is still alive, diffing up clues from her past and holding on to the hope that she is off somewhere living a new life. However, there are hints that she may actually have done something to her daughter that caused more than just a chip on her shoulder.  I give this book high ratings, mainly because it was very well written and a difficult ending to uncover!

A suspenseful whodunnit, told in alternating flashbacks and present day scenes. I really appreciated how Edie was portrayed as a difficult child and found all the main characters to be realistic and multi-faceted.

This book was a bit too dense to be a "thriller"!  Too much detail ... too much going on.  If it were a bit less dense, it would have been a much more enjoyable read.  All of the characters were unlikeable - including Edie who goes missing at age 15.  The way it's written, you have absolutely zero empathy for her and her mother, who spends 20 years waiting for her daughter to come home.  

The plot had a decent twist - but could have been so much more powerful with less verbosity. 

Thank you to Daisy Pearce, Amazon Publishing UK and NetGalley for an advance copy of this book. This review was also published on Goodreads.

The Missing centres around Samantha, whose daughter Edie went missing two decades earlier. The papers said 15 year old Edie was “no angel”, it made her disappearance all to easy to ignore. When a chance encounter with Frances occurs Samantha’s hope is reignited in finding her daughter.
Frances is also compelled to find answers too, after finding a photo of her husband with the girl who went missing.
I was totally engrossed by this. I was berating myself for not being able to stay up all night to get through it in one sitting. The characters were flawed and it made them that much more real. I felt like I was right there with them, feeling their desperation for the truth. I had so many theories going through this, none of them right. The pacing was perfect, the plot unfurled beautifully and all the little details enriched the writing. This was my first Daisy Pearce book and it most certainly won’t be my last.
The Missing is available from the 9th June.
Thank you Netgalley and Amazon Publishing for my copy to review!

Thank you Netgalley for providing me a free ARC in exchange for an honest review.

The story is told from two different perspectives: Frances and Samantha. Frances is an unemployed woman who finds out her husband is cheating on her with a random woman on the internet. She is extremely disappointed that he is cheating, but more so, disappointed that the reality of her becoming a mother is slowly dwindling. Samantha's plot line takes place (mostly) about 20 years before Frances. She is the mother of a rebelious teenager, Edie. When Edie goes missing, Samantha's sanity begins to unravel. Little do Frances and Samantha know that they are both familiar with someone who can crack the case on Edie's disappearance, but it may cost them their lives. 

If I'm being honest, that summary is probably more interesting than the actual book itself. I wanted to love this book so badly, but I struggled to consistently read it. I would go through spurts where I would read for 30 minutes to an hour and be totally immersed in the story line, but I never got excited to pick up the book and read it. I did enjoy Pearce's dark writing and how she was very descriptive, even grotesque at times, because it set the tone for the book. It definitely reminded me of a Lisa Jewell novel in this sense. The last 25% of the book I was totally invested and flipping pages quickly, and I was definitely shocked by the ending. The end of the novel felt the most put together. 

I had difficulty with staying interested in the book because there were many time jumps and the chapters were extremely long. When my Kindle says it will take me 20 minutes to finish a chapter, I often only read one chapter, which is definitely a personal preference and not of fault of the author. The different time jumps did make it difficult to follow. There were a lot of time jumps which made it difficult to follow the plot, especially when I was unsure how Frances and Samantha were connected until about 30% of the book.

Unfortunately, because I really only liked the ending of this book, I have to give it a 2 or 2.5 out of 5 star rating.