Ten-year-old Amy Archer disappeared from her local playground on 31st December 1999. Her body was never found and her parents' lives were torn apart. While father Brian tried to move on and started life with a new family, mother Beth struggled to cope with her grief and regularly sought out pyschics in her desperate quest to learn what happened to her only child.

Ten years after Amy's disappearance, Beth meets Esme, a little girl who looks just like her daughter and knows everything about her. She can't be Amy because she hasn't aged, but as Beth continues to test Esme's claims, she struggles to find another explanation.

This is a troubling book: no one can be unaffected by the stories in the news of girls being kidnapped, harmed and murdered, so it seems wrong to create a fiction on such a subject. However, this story is sensitively and realistically handled and each new twist and revelation is perfectly paced. Just as the reader believes he has grasped the truth, another development unfolds. I did think, though, that the author's introduction of the letter from the school friend was rather lazy and clumsy, but it did not alter my enjoyment/fascination in this book.