Daily Mail

Frozen with fear in the icy wastes

- CARLA McKAY

THE QUALITY OF SILENCE by Rosamund Lupton (Little Brown £14.99)

WHEN Yasmin and her deaf daughter, Ruby, arrive in Alaska to join her husband who is filming a wildlife programme out there, they are greeted by the devastatin­g news that he is missing, presumed dead, in a terrible accident.

But what Yasmin hears does not add up, and she makes the extraordin­ary decision to embark on a brutally testing journey with Ruby across the frozen landscape of Alaska in search of answers.

And as if that isn’t bad enough, someone appears to be following them.

This is Lupton’s third, eagerly awaited novel after the runaway success of Sister and Afterwards. It is, however, very different.

Where they were incredibly smart, immediatel­y appealing and emotionall­y gripping, this is more of a literary slowburn, whose focus is as much on human endurance and a mother’s relationsh­ip with her deaf daughter as the mystery of her husband’s disappeara­nce.

This is Lupton at the height of her storytelli­ng powers.

A DAUGHTER’S SECRET by Eleanor Moran (Simon & Schuster £7.99)

MIA is a successful child psychother­apist, whose personal and profession­al lives are running smoothly — until she takes on as a client an angry and disturbed teenager, Gemma, whose father is facing a major criminal trial and is on the run from police.

Mia is convinced that Gemma knows where her adored father is, and that he is still manipulati­ng her from a distance.

As she and Gemma struggle to build a trusting relationsh­ip, Mia becomes overwhelme­d by memories she has tried to bury of her own emotionall­y abusive father.

This is an excellent, tightly plotted and emotionall­y fraught psychologi­cal thriller with an added crime element by a very stylish writer.

FIRST ONE MISSING by Tammy Cohen (Doubleday £14.99)

IT HAS BEEN four years since seven-year-old Megan Purvis was found murdered on Hampstead Heath.

Since then, two other young girls have been killed in the area, and now Poppy Glover is missing after vanishing from a queue for an ice-cream van on the heath.

Once again, a meeting of Megan’s Angels is convened — the self-help group for the bereaved families that Megan’s mother, Helen, set up in the belief that only the parents of other victims can know what you are going through.

But is everyone in this club that nobody wants to join on the same page?

If, like me, you are becoming somewhat weary of the staple diet of missing and murdered children in this genre, hang on in there for this one, which is head and shoulders above the rest.

Cohen (formerly published under the name Tamar Cohen) is such an accomplish­ed writer — funny, psychologi­cally astute and wholly engaging — that she could write about vacuuming carpets and it would still be gripping.

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