The Cruellest Game

The discovery of the partially-clothed body of a teenage girl in the heart of Bristol’s red light district indicates a tragic yet familiar scenario. But this marks the start of a baffling murder investigation where nothing is as it first appears. Fourteen-year-old Melanie Cooke told her mother she was visiting a school friend. Who was she really going to meet? Detective Inspector David Vogel is led towards three very different principal protagonists, each of whom grows increasingly chilling. But are they what they seem? And is any one of them capable of murder? A darkly complex secret lies behind Melanie’s death — and its ultimate revelation will shock Vogel and his team to the core.

One stormy February afternoon Clara Marshall collected her daughters, six-year-old Lorraine and five-year-old Janine, from school. They were never seen again. Richard Marshall, Clara’s heartbroken husband, had discovered his wife was having an affair with an Australian backpacker and believed her to have run away with him, taking the children with her, destroying the family for ever. That was twenty-seven years ago. John Kelly, veteran journalist, covered the case when he was a trainee reporter and he suspected something far more sinister. His own enquiries could discover no trace of an Australian backpacker, or a journey abroad by Clara and her children. Detective Superintendent Karen Meadows has been familiar with case since childhood and she is only too aware that many suspect Marshall of murdering his wife and children. But where are the bodies? And what is the motive? Then extraordinary events reawaken the case and Kelly and Karen become determined to discover what happened to Clara and her children so long ago, and to seek justice for them...