The Missing By C.L Taylor

[amazon_link id=”0008118051″ target=”_blank” ][/amazon_link]’The Missing’ is the latest book by C.L Taylor.

Someone knows what happened to Billy …When fourteen-year-old Billy Wilkinson goes missing from his Bristol home in the middle of the night, there isn’t a single member of his family that doesn’t feel that they are to blame. But the Wilkinson’s are so used to keeping secrets from one other that it isn’t until a year later, after an appeal for information goes horribly wrong, that the truth begins to surface. Claire Wilkinson, Billy’s mother, begins to suffer from terrifying fugues, vanishing from her home and coming to in strange hotel rooms and on unfamiliar streets. In her handbag are items she’s never seen before. The first time it happens, her doctor writes it off as an unusual reaction to stress. But when she wakes from a blackout with blood on her hands, no one can explain how it got there, least of all Claire. A mother’s bond with her child is unbreakable, but what if she has something terrible to hide.

‘The Missing’ is the latest book by C.L Taylor and the story is about every parents nightmare, when a child goes missing and worst is suspected.

The story is seen through the narrative of Claire, the mother of Billy Hutchinson, whose son goes missing one day and begins six months after his disappearance and the police ask her to make another plea for her sons return. The dark tale is seen through the mother’s eyes, as she fears the worst and tries to deal with every unthinkable scenario imaginable just as kidnapping and death and has to deal with the moments of hope and the moments of utter despair.

As the story develops, we follow Claire and her family of her husband, Mark and their older son Jake and his girlfriend Emma. As time passes, Claire has sudden bouts of black outs and these moments bring on new memories of Billy’s last days and she uses this information to piece together his whereabouts. The story flows in a quick and suspenseful manner, where new evidence and information makes everyone a suspect in the story as new information is revealed and secrets are exposed and Claire discovered that she didn’t know everything about her family. Claire is a strong lead, she’s optimistic about Billy but she does often have moments of clarity which does make for hard reading, as the family fight against each other and emotions run high as they desperately try to find their son.

The story is primarily seen through Claire eyes but there is an addition of chapters featuring messages between two people and these are interesting reading as we try to figure out who the characters are.

‘The Missing’ is an emotionally charging story that keeps pulling the reader in, filled with twists and drama and plenty of suspense, this thrilling and unsettling story about a parents nightmare had me guessing and gripped throughout.

You can buy [amazon_link id=”0008118051″ target=”_blank” ]The Missing from Amazon[/amazon_link] and is available to buy from good bookshops.