Freezing weather, dead bodies and disgruntled detectives make up the landscape of Sarah Ward's debut crime thriller. In Bitter Chill tells dual stories of loss and family secrets in small-town Derbyshire. When schoolgirls Rachel and Sophie accept a lift from a stranger in 1978, Sophie is kidnapped and never seen again. Thirty years later, Rachel, a lonely genealogist obsessed with the notion of family and heritage, is forced to confront the past after Sophie's mother commits suicide. Linking the two cases are two police officers whose different perspectives on the mystery and the town offer a multifaceted view. Sometimes pedestrian prose, a tendency to explain action and a dip in pace when the book reverts to the past are mitigated by Ward's attention to background detail, a decent mystery, and female characters whose plights are believable and sympathetic.
