Hide and Seek: The unmissable new crime thriller from the top ten Sunday Times bestselling author of All Her Fault

Product Information

I was delighted to see that Andrea Mara had written a new book, given that the other three of hers that I've read have all been bangers. Just what happened to Lily on that fateful day so many years ago when a game of Hide and Seek went wrong and so many years later the exact truth behind a little girls disappearance still remains unsolved.

Many of the characters appear in both aspects of the story, mostly the people who are mothers then and grandmothers now, and those who were children in 1985 and grown-ups in 2018. Andrea has this uncanny ability to create a layer of tension that imposes itself on the reader from the very first page and it does not relent until you get to that relief inducing last chapter. Coincidentally, Joanna now lives in the same house as Lily, Sophie is the same age and shockingly the two children have a similar appearance. Joanna is distressed to learn that her new home is the house where three year old Lily Murphy went missing from after playing hide-and-seek thirty years ago. Marissa Irvine arrives at 14 Tudor Grove, expecting to pick up her young son Milo from his first playdate with a boy at his new school.This was a great way to escape reality and I found myself devouring this book a lot faster than I thought I would. While there may be layers upon layers of twists imbedded within the plotline at no point do her words feel over written, the story always feels far too real and plausible. The game of hide and seek is over, everyone has gone home, but little Lily Murphy hasn't been found. A relentless, twisting page-turner, Hide and Seek delves deeply into every parent's worst nightmare. Joanna feels compelled to find out more about the mystery of Lily’s disappearance - but as Joanna attempts to discover the truth from amongst her new community, it becomes clear that Joanna has plenty of her own secrets.

Next door to Joanna is Fran, who was a teenager when Lily went missing and is reluctant to help Joanna dig up the past but Joanna’s own mother-in-law, gossipy, overbearing Susie Stedman is more than willing to fill her daughter-in-law in on all the drama and scandal of years past. In 1985 Cora is a reticent girl of about eight with few friends, who tends to slightly unnerve the adults as well as the neighbourhood children, who finds her only companion in three-year-old Lily. It is one of those books that as a reader at times you find yourself holding your breath, at other times you think you might have solved the mystery of what happened to Lily, only to have it thrown into doubt. Hide and Seek, moving seamlessly between the past and present, is a psychological thriller combined with suspenseful mystery.

When the answers come it is so not what you had in mind but it’s so well thought out in a cleverly executed executed plot? Unbeknownst to them this is the same house that three year old Lily Murphy disappeared from thirty years ago.

From that moment onwards, a sense of dread seems to follow her from room to room and Joanna is determined to unravel the mystery of Lily’s disappearance by tapping into uncomfortable memories and flashbacks from her childhood which she’d rather keep hidden. But alas, it is also from where three-year-old Lily Murphy went missing after playing hide-and-seek thirty years ago as Joanna later learns from her neighbour, Frances Burke next door. She has many secrets and thinks she killed her sister, Lila, when she herself was still a child but I couldn’t work out what that had to do with Lily. The amount of characters makes it difficult to do them all justice, and some ring truer than others.All in all though a good mystery, with the usual twists and turns I am beginning to see from this author. This is a complex plot and you do need to have your wits about you to fully appreciate the execution. When she sees a photo of Lily, it chills her to the core and her own rocky childhood comes rushing to the forefront. She recognises quite a few of the people in some of the photos from 30 years ago but I still couldn’t work out what this all had to do with her sister or why she was so obsessed with Lily.