In Bitter Chill by Sarah Ward

(8. - 1191.) In Bitter Chill by Sarah Ward (2015) - Detective Inspector Francis Sadler (“rangy restlessness”) and Detective Sergeant Damian Palmer (“cropped hair and stocky build”) and Detective Constable Connie Childs (“diminutive” with “attitude”) are called to the death of an elderly woman, Yvonne Jenkins, at the Wilton Hotel in Bampton, Derbyshire. She is an apparent suicide from pills and vodka. Near the bed is a photograph album with newspaper clippings about her young daughter, Sophie, kidnapped 36 years earlier. The anniversary date of the kidnapping was the previous day.

The case had never been solved. Sophie was never found. Yvonne never moved from the tidy modest bungalow which she shared with Sophie until the kidnapping in 1978. It is a home frozen in time.

The case has haunted the local police. Superintendent Llewellyn travels to the hotel before Yvonne is moved. He looks at the album. Though decades have passed since he was a young officer involved in the investigation, he is moved by emotion. He instructs Sadler to re-open the case.

Sophie’s friend, Rachel Jones, still lives at Bampton. In 1978 they had gotten into the back of a car to get a lift to school from a lady. How or why Rachel was freed or escaped those decades earlier has been a mystery.

Rachel works as a family historian, a personal genealogist, creating family trees. She has searched out her family’s past listing only female ancestors. 

A journalist shows up at Rachel’s home and shouts through the slammed front door an offer of more money than Rachel made the previous year if Rachel will talk to her.

With little, if any, new evidence to be found the investigators decide to focus on a pair of “whys”. Why did Rachel survive and why did Yvonne kill herself now? My favourite questions in a crime fiction. 

Rachel is asked by Sadler if anything has come back to her over 36 years:

‘I told you no. Nothing. Can you imagine how that feels? I’ve lain awake night after night trying to remember, but nothing comes back.’ 

The police muse on whether the woman abductor was the perpetrator or an accomplice?

Gradually secrets, not thought important or considered private or concealed or felt irrelevant, emerge to reveal the past. 

A current death, a murder, complicates the investigation. How are the disappearance and recent two deaths connected? They cannot be coincidences.

Rachel must find out the truth of her past to understand the kidnapping. She is sent tumbling back in her memory to the kidnapping by touching and feeling an innocent item. 

Generations of women in Rachel’s family are crucial but how and why are devilishly difficult questions. With Mary, her mother, gone she must look to the uncertain recall of Nancy, her grandmother .

The police search, at the same time. from another perspective the life of the woman who was murdered.

It is striking how solitary or unsettled are the lives of the main characters. Sadler, Connie, Rachel, Yvonne and the last victim all live alone. Damian lives with his fiancee but is terrified about their impending marriage. There is not a significant character in a happy stable spousal relationship.

Ward is skilful at creating characters, whether they have small or great roles in the book. She creates people not just one or two dimensional characters.

The book started slowly with the pace increasing and tension building until it was a race within the plot between Rachel and the police to the solution.

In Bitter Chill is an excellent mystery with satisfying complexity. The reader is as challenged as the police.