Creeping Ivy

When four-year-old Charlotte goes missing from a playground near her home, her mother, Antonia, turns to her cousin Trish Maguire, a barrister with plenty of heartbreaking professional experience of what can happen to children at the hands of abusive adults. But as the police pull out all the stops to find the child, no one is exempt from suspicion. Charlotte's mother faces tabloid vilification for leaving the child in the hands of an unsupervised nanny; her estranged father faces the full rigour of a police investigation; and even Trish finds herself at the top of the list of suspects. Trish is prepared to do anything, to use any of her friends - including Willow King and Emma Gnatche - to find out what has happened to Charlotte, but time is running out and even Antonia is beginning to question Trish's innocence.

An ex-publisher, past Chair of the Crime Writers' Association, and lifelong Londoner, Natasha Cooper writes for a variety of newspapers and journals, including Crime Time and The Times Literary Supplement. She contributes to many radio programmes such as Woman's Hour and Saturday Review, and regularly speaks at crime-writing conferences on both sides of the Atlantic. She is the author of, among many others, FAULT LINES, PREY TO ALL and OUT OF THE DARK. In 2002 she was shortlisted for the Dagger in the Library, an award that 'goes to the author whose work has given most pleasure to readers'.