8 year old Daisy Mason disappears from her family home in Oxford whilst her parents are hosting a BBQ party in their garden. Daisy appears to have vanished into thin air right beneath her parents noses. Detective Inspector Adam Fawley and his team at Thames Valley police start an investigation to find her.
Close to Home is a regular British Police Procedural Crime Thriller that is very easy for the reader to drop into. Although DI Adam Fawley is the main police character, he is part of a team and ALL the other police officers take a full part in this story. There is a diverse range of characters throughout this novel and they are all developed rather well.
I did however have some frustrations with the format of this book. The story floated backwards and forwards in time with the beginnings of each chapter clearly labelled as xx days before the disappearance OR the current day and date. You were then getting background and information that the police had no knowledge of, so you were at times ahead of the police. You are drip fed the story of DI Adam Fawley’s son Jake, tiny piece by tiny piece and this is not essential to the plot but is a distraction. As the story unfolds, things develop to show that every single character may have been responsible for the disappearance of Daisy Mason. Totally ignored is the assumption of innocent until proven guilty and every character is made out to be the bad guy. It would have been nice to have characters who were really nice people and did not raise any suspicions of foul play.
Still, I enjoyed reading Close to Home and accepted the way Cara had chosen to tell her tale. I simply went with the flow and let this story carry me along. I tried not to think who the bad guy was and gave all the characters the benefit of the doubt. Then there was a trigger point towards the end when I thought, ah! I think I know what is going on here and earmarked one character as the bad guy. I am pleased that within the mountain of information thrown at the reader, I was able to spot the 2 vital clues and identify the bad guy!
All in all I think Close to Home is a GOOD 4 star read. It is not outstanding but is purely entertaining in the who-done-it sense of reading pleasure. I really liked that Cara used real locations in and around Oxford, where I spent some time in the 1980’s, rather than use fictional settings.
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