HIDE AND SEEK

Andrea Mara

(Penguin, £8.99)

In Joanna Stedman’s position, most of us would probably react in a similar way. I mean, if you found out that the house you’d just moved into had once been the home of a three-year-old girl who vanished without a trace more than 30 years earlier, you might indulge in a bit of amateur detective work yourself, or at least bone up on the subject with a true-crime podcast or two.

Having just given up her job to be a full-time mother, and moved to the Dublin suburb of Rowanbrook to be near her husband’s parents, Joanna has time to learn about the case. But she’s driven by more than mere curiosity.

For Joanna’s background is a web of lies and guilt she has kept secret from everyone, including her husband, and the case of the missing-presumed-drowned Lily Murphy strikes uncomfortably close to home. Because, if Lily drowned, her body swept away by a river’s current in 1985, then who was the girl adopted into Joanna’s family who resembled her so closely – the “little sister” that Joanna – wait for it – killed?

Leaving aside the bombshell that our narrator admits to killing a member of her own family, the same little girl clearly can’t have died twice. It’s hard to know how to feel about Joanna after that startling confession, but Mara’s premise is so intriguing it can’t fail to keep you reading right to the end.

We don’t know at first how the young Joanna caused the death of Lila, the girl she was told was her sister. But it’s a dark, shocking secret, a terrible burden to have carried all her life.

And not only has Joanna never told anyone about Lila, she’s fabricated a childhood, with rich but remote parents who were killed in a fire, to cover up her true origins.

Now convinced that Lily didn’t die, but was somehow spirited away from her real parents and adopted by her own mother, Joanna starts to make enquiries about her disappearance, and it turns out that many of the people who were there that day are still living in Rowanbrook.

Lily’s parents, the glamorous Californian émigré Mary and her Irish husband Robbie, are both long gone, but those who remain include Joanna’s snooty in-laws and Fran and Cora, who were children at the time and saw Lily on the day she disappeared.

Joanna craves answers, and it’s a wonder no-one tells her to shut up about Lily Murphy as she bombards her new neighbours with questions and keeps them posted about her enquiries.

Her obsession with getting to the bottom of the biggest mystery of her own life involves raking up painful memories and winkling out the domestic secrets of a community she’s only just joined, and the residents of Rowanbrook are, it has to be said, surprisingly tolerant of her.

Such minor reservations aside, Mara fully delivers on her gripping premise. Nothing is what it at first appears and, switching between Joanna’s first-person narration in 2018 and the events of 1985, she gradually peels away the layers of secrecy surrounding Lily’s disappearance to show not only what happened to her that fateful day by the river but also how it connects to the trauma of Joanna’s childhood. Inspired by the very real terror of (briefly) thinking her son had gone missing, Mara has injected a note of darkness and dread into her story, and it’s so well-paced and thought-through that this masterfully constructed mystery can even hold back a couple of sucker punches until the very last page.

ALASTAIR MABBOTT