Gothic, horror suspense set on a “God-Forgotten” island off SCOTLAND
A tense thriller of child abduction set in LONDON
6th December 2024
No One Saw A Thing by Andrea Mara, a tense thriller of child abduction set in London.
Fifteen years ago, several students had a house share in Hackney, London. Now they are all – bar one – assembled to have a weekend get-together in the city of their youth. Aaron, who is a supremely successful barrister in Dublin, is the only member of the group who has brought his wife, Sive, and their three children Faye, Bea and Toby.
There are different group dynamics amongst the friendship group, of course, and Sive is there to support her husband. She knows some of the group members better than others and she is particularly fond of Maggie, who is the organised one, even back then. They intend to spend several days socialising, culminating in a row race (not on water because since Covid this has taken place technically on rowing machines). But they never get that far because Sive, on the Monday morning (at peak rush hour), takes her three children onto the tube at Bond Street Station, but as she is wrestling the pram (a pram on the tube? This demonstrates that Sive is a real out-of-towner), the two older girls hop onto the train and she is left behind with the pram, as the doors swish shut. She mouths at them to get off at the next stop and she follows along behind and duly finds Bea but there is no sign whatsoever of six year old Faye.
The author really captures the drama and total stress of the event and then moves on to the aftermath, exploring the group dynamics in flashbacks and building up to the horror of Monday morning by moving back and forth throughout the weekend. We learn a little about personalities and interactions and gradually learn about the high level of secrets in the group. There are various twists and turns and possible perpetrators behind the child’s disappearance, highlighted as the police and the parents chase back and forth across the city in their search for young Faye.
One of the characters is to all intents and purposes an interloper, a journalist and so part of the story addresses the moral issue of uploading every turn in events on to Social Media and feeding the press. Is this done out of helpful magnanimity or is posting in these circumstances really a way of boosting numbers and content?
I felt generally very invested in the story and as it came to its conclusion, I did feel there was a level of complexity, which, for me, didn’t particularly add much. And sometimes the extrapolations and deductions were a little tenuous – in one scene it is mooted that a foreigner might have changed their name and his ex partner is clear that the change would have some distinct connection to their original; I am not sure I would even know my partner well enough to be able to categorically state their thinking on this matter, so that felt a bit weak. But otherwise, the story bowls along at a cracking and suspenseful pace.
Tina for the TripFiction Team
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