About the Author
Lisa Hall is the bestselling author of Between You & Me, which sold over a quarter of a million copies and was the fifth top selling title on Amazon in 2016. Since then, she's written two critically acclaimed books Tell Me No Lies and The Party, and she's a real rising star in the crime community.
Lisa lives in a small village in Kent, surrounded by her towering TBR pile, a rather large brood of children, dogs, chickens and ponies and her long-suffering husband. She is also rather partial to eating cheese and drinking wine.
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Buy Have You Seen Her
About the book
Bonfire Night. A missing girl.
Anna only takes her eyes off Laurel for a second. She thought Laurel was following her mum through the crowds. But in a heartbeat, Laurel is gone.
Laurel’s parents are frantic. As is Anna, their nanny. But as the hours pass, and Laurel isn’t found, suspicion grows.
Someone knows what happened to Laurel. And they’re not telling.
This is fraught psychological thriller about the disappearance of a young child, and how the weight of it lays heavily on each one of the characters.
I have to be slightly critical of Anna here, because who lets a really young child wander off in the midst of a large crowd and just assume that they are following their mother, and that the mother is aware of that fact.
Hall captures the frenzy of the press and the onlookers really well. Opinions sway between feeling sorry for the parents and pointing the finger of blame right at them. The author makes the comparison to the McCann case and the way the parents have been treated like the perpetrators from the very beginning instead of the parents of a missing child. The problem with presuming guilt and uncorroborated suspicions is that the attention is drawn away from the victim.
The other thing the author describes well is the often taut and fractious relationship between mother and nanny or au-pair. The child often develops a strong relationship to the care-giver, and depending on how little time the parents spend with the child, that relationship can supersede the parental one. It can cause jealousy between care-giver and parent, especially the mother.
Being a nanny or an au-pair can be a thankless job. It's often nothing more than the underpaid position of someone who is expected to take care of the children, cook, clean, shop and anything else the employers can think of, and then try to navigate the guilt, anger and pomposity of said employers at the same time.
It's a complex woven web of motives. Everyone is a suspect and appears to have something to hide. The author keeps the readers looking in certain directions, whilst the real culprit is walking around in plain sight.
It's a riveting psychological thriller, where there are no clear shades of black or white, because somehow everyone is guilty of something. Hall manages to keep the reader completely in the dark for the most part, which makes the read even better.
Buy Have You Seen Her at AmazonUk or go to Goodreads for any other retailer. Publisher: HQ; pub date 2 May 2019. Buy at Amazon com.
Read my review of Tell Me No Lies by Lisa Hall
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