‘It wasn’t until the train went past that she saw the small body lying in the long grass by the side of the wood. She couldn’t tell how long she’d been searching for her daughter. It was dusk, but it had seemed darker as she ran through the wood, tripping on hooked tree roots, her feet crunching through crisp, curled ash leaves.’

Laura feels helpless when she learns that her nine-year-old daughter, Autumn, is being bullied at school. When Autumn fails to return home from school one day, Laura goes looking for her. She finds a group of older children taunting her little girl. In that moment, Laura makes a decision and commits an act that will have terrible consequences for both her and her daughter.

I started reading this book with the thought that it was going to be an average psychological thriller, nothing special, one to read and enjoy but swiftly forget. And that was exactly what I got.

The dual narrative shared between Autumn and Laura didn’t help the plot at all. Often it was simply the same scene told from two different perspectives, which might have worked had the scenes not read like they were told by the same person. Autumn sounded nothing like a nine-year-old girl and any attempts to make her sound like a child seemed contrived and clichéd.

Perhaps this is a book that will appeal more to parents, centring as it does on a situation that many will be able to empathise with. However, it becomes more and more unrealistic as it goes on and everything that happened was predictable and therefore dull.

I cared little about the characters and it was only the prospect of a twist that kept me reading. However, the ending was disappointing and the twist that I was waiting for to make it all worth it never came. The writing was nothing special and often made little sense, riddled with clichés and judgemental presumptions that sounded more as if they were coming from the author than the narrator.

If you have a few hours to kill and you want a book that’s not going to take too much brainpower, I’d recommend Bone By Bone. Otherwise, I would suggest you keep looking.

Thanks very much to Atlantic for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.