"Missing, Presumed" by Susie Steiner

Posh girl Edith, doing a PhD at Cambridge, goes missing from her Huntingdon home after a drunken night out. Boyfriend? Best girl friend (last person to see her)? Father? Local sex pest? The Huntingdon cops have a high profile misper, possibly murder, on their hands.

And then a body turns up in the Ouse.

Told as a police procedural from multiple points of view: female DS (getting older, no baby, lonely and desperate, internet dating with most becoming one night stands); mother; male DC (cheerful chappy but breaking up with his controlling girlfriend); flaky misper's girlfriend.

I didn't get the twist although I think my solution was better.

Most interesting from my point of view because I know most of the places mentioned. She is very accurate about places although I couldn't work out how she took the train to Bedford from Huntingdon.

And there is a delightful relationship between the desperate female DS and the ten year old brother of a murder victim.

Some nice lines:

• “She picks up her toothbrush and lays along it a slug of toothpaste.” (p 5)
• “Man makes pudding! round of applause!” (p 9)
• “He rubs his hands together and blows into them.” (p 27)
• “The passage of time ... is like a growing tumour for a missing person, as if time itself drains the life from their bodies.” (p 83)
• “The sky has turned pink, striated yellow; a radioactive lozenge at its centre, reflected in the river.” (p 152)
• “before you know it, it can be too late” (p 157)
• “a plastic bag, bowling along in mid air, it handles like beseeching arms.” (p 194) 
• “‘I should have fuckwit tattooed on my forehead’
• ‘Wouldn’t fit’. ...
• ‘Just twat then’” (p 345)
• “Quite a few of [her] sexual selections have been based on paper-thin criteria, like being in the same room.” (p 414)

November 2017; 419 pages