Alice Fancourt gives birth to her first child, Florence, just two weeks before she ventures out of the house for the first time. Gone just two hours she returns to find the door open, her husband asleep and Florence replaced with a different baby.

With a fragmented history of mental illness, Alice who lives with her husband David, his mother and David's son Felix from a previous marriage - is understandably distressed, but with no other baby reported missing, she struggles to convince anyone that she is telling the truth.

In order to put everybody's mind at rest Alice's mother in-law agrees to pay for a private DNA test, but during the week in which they wait for the results, David sets out to discredit Alice further through merciless tricks and mind games.

When Alice disappears with the baby the night ahead of the DNA test the police are finally forced to take the situation seriously and so begins a frenzied race against time to find Alice and her baby.

Often with crime thrillers, by the time you reach the halfway point you have at least developed some kind of theory about who did it but not in this book.

I could barely put it down and with just 15 pages left until the end, I was still trying to figure out if an actual crime had even been committed at all.

Definitely worth a read.

Lydia Hayward