Written by Lizzie Fry

Available from Amazon
I’m not the perfect wife. I’m not the perfect mother. But I didn’t do anything to harm my little boy.

Lizzie Fry is back with another tense crimey-thriller to follow-up on the equally dark and shocking, The Good Mother.

Little Boy Missing is told from the perspective of Jo, a tired and struggling mum of three boys. When her son Kyle goes missing playing hide and seek in the local park, fingers are pointed all over the place as Jo and the police try to figure out where Kyle is and whether someone took him. With Kyle’s special needs thrown into the mix, things become more fraught for Jo as she frantically searches for her boy, desperate to bring him home to where he feels safe.

With all the usual life pressures and growing troubles in her marriage, Jo is soon considered one of the prime suspects as she undertakes her own investigation into the local weirdo living near the park and the nearby travelling community who may know more about the mysterious “beanie man” seen in the park at the time Kyle went missing.

Little Boy Missing is a simple tale, and when I say that I don’t mean it is a bad book, just that there are no unnecessary ‘bells and whistles’ here, just good old-fashioned storytelling. The set up is simple and the family feels familiar, people we know and are comfortable with, but then Lizzie makes sure it all goes to shit and the solution is anything but simple. The book is presented as if Jo is talking to Kyle, recounting her thougths and feelings after he goes missing, laying her soul bare on the page, and this makes it all the more realistic and believable as Jo’s world collapses around her.

Throughout Little Boy Missing I was flitting between suspects, convinced I had the right one, even accusing some who ended up having little bearing on the story at all, but that is the skill of the author, weaving a tangled web where everyone could be a suspect, and it is never quite clear who until the devastating ending. There are many red herrings in Little Boy Missing and a plethora of potential suspects. Could it have been Jo? Would a loving mother really hurt her own child? Could dad’s dumped lover have been looking for revenge? What about Jo’s brother in law and his family?

Anyone who enjoys a bit of crime or a thriller is likely going to enjoy Little Boy Missing. Lizzie is a great writer who doesn’t waste space on the page and doesn’t get bogged down with over-writing – she just tells a good story and she tells it well. Little Boy Missing is one of those books that you could easily read in one sitting; Lizzie draws you in with her characters and drags you along for the ride as you join Jo’s search for the truth about what happened to Kyle.

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Lizzie Fry is the alter-ego of Lucy V Hay, author and friend of writers via her Bang2Write blog.