Dr Andy Body is the narrator in this novel. He lives with his wife, Laura, and their children, 16-year-old Connor and 12-year-old Harriet, in Nottingham. One night Andy is waiting for Connor to return home after a night out. He gets up and walks to the boy's room and is relieved to see him in bed.
The next day his brother Rob calls, asking if his son Zac is there. Apparently, the two cousins are very close, but Andy says that Zac is not there. He drives to the wood where the boys had spent the night, but they only find Zac's keys. Rob finally reports his son's disappearance to the police.
When Andy returns home, he sees his son from behind, and as he is about to talk to him, he realises that the person who has spent the night in his house is not Connor but Zac. Andy tries to talk to Zac, but he only says that Connor told him that he could sleep here as he had lost his keys. Connor is not in the house, and now he is the missing boy. Then Laura tells him that in the wassap group of the school a mother is saying that her daughter Emily is missing. Then Andy texts saying that his son is also missing. He learns that some teenagers - Connor, Zac, Emily, Olivia and Drew - went to a party and then to the woods.
Then Andy gets a call from the police. They have Connor and he is fine but in police custody. Andy and Laura go to the station, and the first thing they see is that Connor has bruises on his face, and when they express their concern, they are told that he has been checked. Then the police start asking him about him wanting to break into a house and how he ran away when the police approached him. They also ask him about Emily's disappearance. What surprises Andy is that the boy keeps saying 'no comment' and he thinks that this makes him appear suspicious. Connor is allowed to go without charges, and at home Connor won't say much.
Andy is worried and goes to the area where Emily disappeared, and that is when he sees Cathy, her mother, and another man who he later learns is Cathy's partner. Cathy is kind, but her partner, Karl, who is the PE teacher at the school, makes accusations against Connor.
At home Andy tries to talk to Rob, but he keeps stalling him. So the next day he goes to his house. Zac is home, and he tells his uncle that his father has told him to keep away from Connor. When Andy is driving home, he sees his brother's car parked opposite a house, and then he sees his brother leave in the company of Karl, Cathy's partner, another man and a woman. When Andy confronts him, he discovers that the other two people are Drew's father and Olivia's mother. So all the parents of the children who were in the woods that night have got together, and Andy feels left out. Rob says that they came together to help find Emily, and he can't explain why Andy was not summoned.
When Rob leaves, Andy knocks at the house, and Alexander, Drew's father, welcomes him. He is pleasant and tells him that the reason why he didn't ask him to get together with the others is because he thought it would be awkward, as Karl is not an easy man. Since Connor is the only one who was arrested in connection with Emily's disappearance, the situation could have been difficult.
Apart from Andy's narration, there are some chapters about the night of Emily's disappearance from the perspective of the teenagers. We discover that Connor was smitten with Emily, and Zac begrudged the fact that she was using him. Then Emily and Drew started kissing, and when Connor realised that he was forcing her to be intimate with him, he confronted Drew and they came to blows, and that is why Connor had those injuries in his face. And we also discover that Emily had a plan to leave on some kind of mission. Connor helped her and she even had some burner phones so that she couldn't be located. I wonder where Emily is and why her friends aren't talking. Could her disappearance connected to her mother's partner?
I have to say that the character I like best is Harriet. She is so bright and fresh; we learn that she has been bullied for being small and brainy, and Connor confronted her bullies, one of whom is Drew, and it seems that the bullying stopped.
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