The best recent thrillers – review

Sibling child abductors, assassins on the run and a killer at large after a nuclear attack all feature in this month’s selection

We’re not starved for choice these days when it comes to disturbing thrillers: murderous nannies in Leïla Slimani’s Lullaby; foully intentioned lovers in, well, the majority of new titles. But even by these standards, Alice Clark-Platts’s The Flower Girls (Raven Books) goes to some very dark places indeed.

The author, a former human rights lawyer, opens her story in 1997, as sisters Rosie and Laurel lure a toddler away from a playground. Nineteen years later, the now notorious pair are known as the Flower Girls, loathed by the press, “their parents as shocked as the rest of the world at the depravity bubbling up from their gene pool”. One of them is in prison, while the other has been given a new identity, “just like the reviled Maxine Carr, or James Bulger’s murderers”, for her own safety. It’s on her 25th birthday that a five-year-old child goes missing from a remote hotel she has been staying at with her partner, and the past comes flooding into the present as her identity is revealed. “It is as if a chasm has opened up beneath her, and all the castles in the air she has built over the years … are minutes away from being dashed to smithereens.”

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from Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2sOaJT8

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