Lisa Kallisto is the kind of mother who has already decided what her headstone will say: "She was just so overwhelmed." Her husband is a cab driver; she runs an animal shelter that is perpetually short on funds and overflowing with unwanted pets. She has three kids, three dogs, a drafty rental house with a stack of unpaid bills on the kitchen table. Her best friend, Kate Riverty, on the other hand, has a smoking-hot husband who brings in enough money from his vacation-rental business to allow Kate to drop their two immaculately presented children off at school and come home to do nothing more than "put her washing machine on and write thank-you notes to people she doesn't really like." Then Kate's 13-year-old daughter Lucinda goes missing, while she was supposed to be staying overnight at the Kallisto's house. Everyone in their tiny town in the English Lake District is a suspect, but a secret that Lisa and Kate's husbands share—sorry, not telling—further complicates the plot of this taut novel. Daly has said she wrote this novel because "possibly the only thing worse than your own child going missing would be to be responsible for the disappearance of a friend's." Another reason? Because we all need a reminder that no woman has it all under control, not even in fiction, where anything imaginable—zombies, vampires and handwritten thank-you notes included—is possible.
— Andrea Walker
