Lost: A Lacey Flint Novel (Lacey Flint Novels) - Hardcover

*Starred Review* On leave following her horrific experience in Dead Scared (2012), Detective Constable Lacey Flint finds herself emotionally ill-equipped to return to the job she once loved, and equally unable to stamp out her growing feelings for colleague Detective Inspector Mark Joesbury. Consequently, she spends her days alone and unapproachable in her apartment, taking long nighttime walks, and watching the kids who congregate at the local community center to smoke and mess around. One of those kids is her neighbor Barney Roberts, an amiable but obviously troubled preteen, whose single-parent father is clueless when it comes to the needs of his son. In the meantime, five young boys who have gone missing in South London have begun to turn up—­exsanguinated and, of course, very, very dead. When Lacey’s midnight forays put her in proximity to one of the murders, she becomes a suspect, though it takes Barney’s disappearance to make her react; but by then it may be too late to help her young friend. Bolton sets aside the gothic-tinged atmosphere of her early novels in favor of a more visceral sensibility, exerting immediate and continuing pull by stepping in and out of an unnamed killer’s mind. Couple the strong narrative drive with a pair of dysfunctional but surprisingly sympathetic characters, and you have a nail-biting thriller that will send readers back to Bolton’s previous books and, of course, have them lining up for whatever the author comes up with next. --Stephanie Zvirin