Elizabeth is Missing – Emma Healey

 Maud knows Elizabeth is missing, it is written on a scrap of paper, and that is how Maud remembers things now, her head being unreliable for that purpose. She tells her daughter, Helen, and the police, but no-one does anything about it.

Maud has to rely on herself to find Elizabeth, but it is hard to investigate when she cannot remember clues and her mind keeps slipping back seventy years to another disappearance, that of her sister, Sukey.

Sukey disappeared just after the war and never turned up again. She was not long married to Frank, who was a bit of a chancer mixed up in the black market. Did he do something to her? Could it have something to do with the young lodger, Douglas, who clearly held a torch for her? Or did the madwoman down the street do her in for no reason at all?

The stories of the missing Elizabeth and Sukey unfold in tandem, often mixed up in Maud’s mind, though her recollections of Sukey are the more reliable. It is Maud’s long-suffering daughter who must cope with Maud’s twin concerns, one real but historic and the other current but unsubstantiated.

Maud’s narrative gives an insight into what it may be like (who can tell how accurate) to have dementia, by turns funny and frightening. The seamless transitions from present to past to present again, losing and regaining names, locations, and the plot generally, all has an authentic feel that generates sympathy, for both Maud and Helen.

It is uncertain to the end whether either disappearance will be resolved. And if one is, will Maud even realise?

The Dry – Jane Harper

 The book-packing journey reaches Australia and the remote community of Kiewarra.

Kiewarra has not seen rain for two years, but it has not seen Aaron Falk for longer than that, twenty years in fact, until he turns up for the funeral of his boyhood pal, Luke Hadler. Luke, wife Karen, and son Billy are all dead, shot, apparently in a murder - suicide tragedy with Luke the perpetrator. The big question is why?

Easier to answer is why Aaron Falk has been away for twenty years. He and his father were run out of town following the drowning of Ellie Deacon, a girl young Aaron was seeing at the time. He has been ‘allowed’ back for the day of the funeral to pay his respects. But when Luke’s parents ask Aaron to ‘look into things’, after all he is a police detective in Melbourne, he hangs around and starts making enquiries.

Kiewarra is a powder keg in more ways than one. It is bone dry; farms are parched, and people are fractious and worried for their livelihoods. Secrets, and favours owed, are concealed in a web of deceit and mistrust. Falk’s probing is unwelcome but throws up new possibilities in the Hadler case, even suggesting links back the suspicious death of Ellie Deacon.

Despite the wide horizons of the outback, the atmosphere is small-town claustrophobic. The plot is cunning as characters mislead and clues misguide Falk right to the end. Tension mounts and the powder keg threatens to blow.

Once Upon a River – Dianne Setterfield

 The river is the Thames, specifically between Cricklade and Oxford. Midway down that stretch is the Swan Inn where on midwinter’s eve the regulars – the bargemen, the gravel-diggers, and the cress-growers – gather to tell and listen to stories in the days when entertainment had to be self-generated.

The gathering is rudely interrupted when a man, battered and bloodied, bursts in, dripping wet, with a similarly drenched, unconscious child in his arms When he then collapses, the local freelance nurse, Rita Sunday, is sent for. The man’s identity is revealed by a business card his sodden wallet. He is Henry Daunt, pioneering photographer. As he remains unconscious, and the child says nothing, her identity is open to speculation.

It could be Daunt’s daughter. But she is of an age consistent with a baby girl snatched from the big house two years earlier. Within a day another candidate emerges. A destitute abandoned mother has hung herself and her daughter, last seen being held on a bridge over the river, is missing. Then a crazed woman turns up claiming the child is her sister.

Though Daunt recovers and confirms it is not his child, that still leaves three rival claims. Anthony Vaughan, from the big house, needs to believe it is his snatched daughter, Amelia; Robert Armstrong, father-in-law of the suicide, hopes it is his never-seen grandchild, Alice; and crazed Lily White is convinced it is her sister, Ann, drowned twenty years since, finally given back up by the river.

The good guys, Rita Sunday, Henry Daunt, Robert Armstrong, and Anthony Vaughan band together to determine the truth. In doing so, dark deeds are uncovered. For those who witness life and death by river, the supernatural cannot be discounted.

The light gothic style flows as well as the river that forms the dramatic, ever-present backdrop. The main characters have a surprising depth to them, which sees them struggle not so much with physical foes as with conflicting emotions. Some, at least, will have hopes dashed, but hopefully all will get closure.