1985. Separated from her little sister at the children’s home where they are taken as orphans, Holly Moore is a troubled teenager in need of love.

When she meets a man who promises to take care of her, she hopes her luck has finally changed.

2015. The clock is ticking for Superintendent Jo Hamilton when the discovery of a young woman’s remains takes her back to an unsolved case from the past. As a constable, Jo was often called out to deal with runaways from Morgate House, but when Holly Moore disappeared – after another female resident fell from the cliffs – Jo was convinced the home was hiding something. Now, with only days before her forced retirement, Jo decides to track down Holly’s sister and re-open the case. But will the trail lead her disturbingly close to home?

My Review

I read this book with my online bookclub The Pigeonhole, in 12 staves. It really added to the enjoyment, discussing the story with my online friends and fellow readers.

The book is written in four timelines. Olive, who is around 90 years old, lives in a nursing home, but during the war she was a motorcycle dispatch rider at Bletchley Park. Daisy Moore is one of her carers. In 1975, Daisy and her sister Holly were sent to live in a children’s home – Morgate House – following a fire which killed their parents. At the same time, Morgate teenager Gemma was found dead at the bottom of a cliff, ruled to be a suicide. Jo Hamilton was just starting out in the police force at the time.

In 1985, Holly disappeared, and was never found. We know there was a man involved and he was a police officer, but who was he? And was he the same man involved with Gemma ten years earlier?

In 2015 a young woman’s remains are discovered. Could this be Holly? Jo needs to speak to Daisy, but Daisy is avoiding her. I did find Daisy annoying at times, not because I didn’t understand her attitude, but because it was frustrating for the reader. Unfortunately Jo, now a Superintendent, is retiring in a few days time, and no-one seems keen to help her unlock the cold cases of Holly and Gemma.

Everyone and everything is linked. I usually find that all a bit far-fetched, but in this case it works perfectly. So why only four stars? Firstly, the tight timelines made it too easy to work out the ‘villain’ in the story from his age, and secondly, because for me there was one loophole that was never closed, which concerned a couple of characters mentioned at one stage.

As an aside, in the author’s notes she mentions that her mother-in-law told her what life was like starting out in the police force as a woman in the 1970s. She couldn’t believe the sexism, and the allocation of ‘blue’ and ‘pink’ jobs for men and women. Being of a similar age to Jo I am not remotely surprised. It was like that in all jobs and sometimes still is.

As a second aside, my sister-in-law’s mother and father met at Bletchley Park. I think she did what Lorna does in the story. I don’t really know what he did – he wasn’t allowed to talk about it. After the war she had the first of their four daughters and gave up work. They moved to Cheltenham where he worked with Alan Turing and Hugh Alexander (who wasn’t the handsome womaniser he was portrayed as in the film The Imitation Game by Matthew Goode). He worked there until he retired, being called back during the Falklands War.

When I worked in the Post Office from 2010 till 2018, we had a customer called Betty, who also worked at Bletchley and was one of the only ones left. https://bletchleypark.org.uk/codebreaker-wall/about-our-bricks/ tells you about the ‘bricks’. Betty had a brick which my brother photographed for me and my boss had it printed out and laminated and we gave it to Betty as a surprise. None of these three are alive today.

Many thanks to The Pigeonhole, the author and my fellow Pigeons for making this such an enjoyable read.

About the Author

Here is Emily’s own introduction:

“Hello everyone,

“Thank you for checking out my author page. Even writing this is a dream come true for me.

“I’ve wanted to be a published author since my mother, Penny Vincenzi, got her first book deal, when she and I would walk and talk about everything plots and stories together.

“Fast forward thirty years and I have discovered it is slightly more difficult than she made it look. But still, I got there eventually, because it is in my blood, and also, because I have always existed, slightly, in a world of my own, and reading and writing books allows me to make a living from that. I still remember my eleven-year-old self, a little at odds with the world, sitting on the cold parquet floor of St Lawrence Junior School utterly gripped as Mr Thomas read us all Boy by Roald Dahl.

“After graduating in Journalism in 1997 I began writing scripts and had two episodes of BBC Doctors commissioned, but I wasn’t keen on all the endless drafts and input from Script Editors and Producers. So, while I worked as a PA at the BBC and the Daily Mirror newspaper I learned as much as I could about storytelling until it all became fodder for my debut novel, The Girl in the Letter.

“I really hope you enjoy it, and my follow-up novel which I am busy researching as we speak. I live in Brighton, Sussex, with my husband Steve, an architect, and my two crazy, beautiful girls, Grace and Eleanor. We read a lot of Julia Donaldson and Roald Dahl, in between walking Merlin our whippet on the beach but when I’ve got a deadline I rely on their tablets rather a lot and feel incredibly guilty most of the time.

“If you’d like to get in touch, please do visit me on Twitter @EmilyGunnis and Instagram @emilygunnis.

“And if you’re really stuck for something to do, feel free to review my book. I would love to know what you think.

“Keep reading!

“Love Emily x”