Lost Girls (Charlotte Philby)

The publisher’s presentation

A missing teenager, a city full of secrets…

When the daughter of the Swedish Ambassador disappears from her prestigious London school in broad daylight, the authorities are on high alert. There are no witnesses and no ransom demand: thirteen-year-old Freya Sjöberg has vanished into thin air.

With the Metropolitan Police out of their depth, specialist agent DS Madeleine Farrow is called in to handle the case. As a former pupil at Wimpole Girls, she knows the school’s affluent corridors only too well. But even she can’t anticipate the dark secrets held within its walls.

With the clock ticking since Freya’s disappearance, Madeleine must return to a place that holds painful memories to find a girl who has left no trace. For help, she calls on dogged – and occasionally maverick – young private investigator Ramona Chang. Together the unlikely pair find themselves plunged into a world of extreme wealth and dangerous secrets.

The deeper they dig, the more they uncover – exposing a tangled web of conspiracy and lies that could change everything they thought they knew about the case, and each other.

My reading experience

I enjoyed the first book featuring Madeleine Farrow and Ramona Chang, Dirty Money.
This one brings our two investigators onto a new trail, that of a young girl, daughter of the Swedish ambassador, who disappears from her school.
Like the first book, this one starts slowly and builds a nice forest of information, red herrings and questions (the title being plural is one of them) for the reader to get lost into. And again, it seems to find inspiration in some rather sad stories that made the news headlines some years ago.
Madeleine and Ramona are great characters. They are so different and they are so complementary at the same time. They understand each other but they keep secrets from each other too. In fact, in this book, everyone keeps secrets from everyone, and it makes it quite an interesting read to keep track of all the said and unsaid information.
I also enjoy Charlotte Philby’s writing, with a mix of precision of facts, rhythm, depth of characters and pauses that give her characters time to think, to show their feelings and challenges to the reader, and to keep us interested.
This was a page turner and a very good read again from Charlotte Philby. I can definitely see Madeleine and Ramona returning for another book.

Thank you to Netgalley and John Murray Press, Baskerville, for giving me the opportunity to review this book. All opinions are my own.