This book is one of Delinsky's best. She has researched and written about a terrible crime that effects everyone in this country and probably worldwide: Child Abduction.

The mix of characters, a dishrag mother, Emily, whose life has been dominated and controlled by her husband, Doug, who has been punishing her for 19 years by abandoning her in the trumped up guise of needing to work extra long hours, days, months, and, naturally it involves excessive traveling. Doug is a rigid jerk who despises and loathes Emily for leaving their son in a car while running into a post office in their small town only to return and find the child gone. His dishonesty with Emily is a real gut wrencher.

There is a cast of good girl friends and a "renter" Brian, who is a cop with a 2 year old left in his care due to his wife dying in an accident. He puts the moves on Emily right away when he sees her husband has literally abandoned her. And she doesn't resist. The plot thickens when Jill, their only surviving child, away in Boston at college, observes her lying, cheating father on the door step of a townhome there embracing a woman and kissing a little boy. Jill lets her mother know in a very oblique way and this leads to the discovery by Emily of the facts.

Emily finally gets the guts to remedy the problem, yet it is very hard to identify with her in a truly sympathetic way especially after the desperately dependent Emily starts cheating with the renter Brian while her husband is away. Two wrongs do NOT make a right no matter how justified the author wants us to believe. Especially since this is a morality tale and the immorality of the characters cancels its impact.

There are enough subplots to keep the most demanding reader
engaged. I hated her self pity and morose self absorption. I really hated her betrayal of her marriage BEFORE she discovers her husband's cheating. It was very jarring and I wish the author had introduced Brian late in the story, after the unmasking of the duplicity of Doug to make it, perhaps, more decent. Otherwise it is a story of two cheating spouses grieving over a lost child. The ending is a non event. The crazy old neighbor woman Myra is not at all believable and in fact is massively annoying. To find that she has harbored the secret of the lost child's death is just too far fetched. But, the fact of the missing children theme is educational and well meant.

This was the first book I've read by this author but it certainly won't be the last. I love how this book made me think about the people who mean the most in my own life. The saddest part of this book was when I reached the last page because I had come to know the characters so well that I didn't want the story to end.