It's the story of a murder and a missing baby. The Fullman's were sleeping when someone kidnapped their baby and murdered the nanny. DS Kate Redman was assigned the case and started investigating...but she had no idea how intricate it was going to be. The book has lots of characters to keep up with. The storylines were also numerous, and the motives were a bit too ambiguous. The background story of Kate, our protagonist, is crucial to this entire plot. It was the one thing that lets us truly understand Kate...which when reading descriptions for other books in this series, is important, as Kate is the "star" character in all of them. I thought that DS Kate Redman was a bit too judgmental of the people that she had only just met. I know that this is what we all do as human beings, but it can cloud the judgement and cause evidence to be overlooked in a police officer that is too quick to judge and accuse. Kate also worked off of too many of her personal "hunches".... how she is feeling, what she gathers from someone’s facial expressions... that's certainly okay to take notice of and mentally store away...but not to immediately assume anything. Some of the characters were just left hanging in the wind with no explanations at the end. With so many of them being suspected, their paths could/should have been much more intricate and connected. In the end, it feels like most of them held no significance at all...just added to the word count and could’ve been omitted long before. When the plot started to follow a different character's perspective, it became quite confusing since we never found out much of anything about him. I wasn't particularly satisfied with the ending either. A lot of questions were left unanswered, and the story ended abruptly and became very predictable. One thing the book did do well was developing DS Kate Redman as a likeable, capable, character encouraging readers to perhaps continue the series. I gave the book 3 stars... It was the first book in the series, the character of Kate Redman had likeable qualities...but I'm not sure I will be visiting with her again. ( )

Felt like there was a spark missing in this book. The mystery was okay. Kate was kind of an annoying character. I didn't really relate to her and I definitely didn't connect. She's a real loose cannon without anything likeable to back it up. ( )

D.S. Kate Redman first day working in the West Country finds her and the rest of the team investigating the disappearance of Charlie Fullman, a three month boy.
Look forward to reading the next in the series. ( )

It was a regrettably uninteresting and unconvincing tale. I didn't buy into any of the characters and their personal angst, and kept waiting for something to happen but it was really humdrum... Too bad, as I rather enjoyed the mystery from her other series (Merisham Manor?). ( )

Quite possibly the most boring mystery I've read. ( )