When Detective Billie Ann Wilde receives a desperate call that five-year-old Emma Wilson is missing, she rushes to the family home. But inside the picture-perfect house surrounded by Florida marshlands, she finds no children's clothes or toys, no photos of the innocent child Emma's mother Marissa describes. Billie suspects Marissa Wilson is hiding from someone.
It's a race against the clock to find Emma. But Marissa refuses to tell Billie anything about her past, and before long, she also disappears...
And then Billie realizes who Marissa is.
She's the ten-year-old girl Billie failed to find in her first ever case fourteen years ago. The leads went cold because Billie made a fatal mistake.
As more bodies turn up in the same marshlands, Billie must revisit her past and face up to her demons to find Marissa and her child. But she is unknowingly putting herself in the path of a terrifying serial killer...
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Marissa Clemens smiled the way only a mother could when looking at her child.- PROLOGUE, Cocoa Beach, Florida
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(Bookouture, 2 February 2024, e-galley, 304 pages, #ARC from the Publisher via NetGalley, Blog Tour 5 February)
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I enjoyed Don't Let Her Go a lot. I liked the fact the chapters move between the current case and the past when a teenager called Kitty goes missing and is used as a baby farm for her twisted captors. The chapters set in the past are quite hard to read at times as at first Kitty loves the man who rapes her and sees him and his wife almost as her family. There were some chilling moments. This is the kind of thriller I love, full of twists and turns and with more questions than answers. The pacing is spot on. I flicked the pages desperate to know the link between the past and present and how everything would come together. I also liked Billie, she's very real and human and comes to life on the page. I'd recommend Don't Let Her Go.
