This was a mostly enjoyable but predictable read I did love the initial mystery which is what first grabbed my attention and sold me on reading this. There’s just something about a whole bus of primary school children just vanishing into thin air that equally repels and entices it’s definitely every parent's worst nightmare including mine. So class 3b head off on a school trip to a local wildlife park only to fail to return on schedule all 10 primary-age children plus 4 teachers have seemingly vanished into thin air. This is then told from multiple viewpoints as the parents some of them quite high/profile experience all of the fear and uncertainty whilst also wrestling with many skeletons and demons in their personal closets.

The children of Class 3 B have been dropped off by their parents. They are to go to an animal park in a close by town. Little did they know, that this might have been the last time they’d see their children. The van with ten eight-year-old children and four teachers disappears. The police gets involved and a rave against time begins. What are the reasons for a whole class to disappear? I was absolutely hooked on trying to work out which of the suspects’ secrets might be relevant to the disappearance and which are about other things (mainly affair-related!). The perspectives hopped between parents Eldon, Claire, Reynold, Ben and the police investigators, and the author does a great job balancing what is revealed while we are in the various viewpoints. The premise of the book is intriguing and had a lot of potential, but I found it to be quite tame and predictable. The plot was fairly straightforward, and I guessed most of what was going to happen from the first few chapters. I was hoping for more suspense and surprises, but unfortunately, the story fell flat. This book is written in third person perspective with several protagonists.The benefits of third person perspective with multiple protagonists are that it let's you see the bigger picture of what's going on and you get to know more characters more, what they are thinking and what they are doing. It feels like you get to see the whole picture and not miss out in anything. To have the benefit of both first and third person perspective ensures you don't miss out on anything.Apart from Monique, none of the other parents seemed that bothered that their children had not returned from their day trip. The others were more bothered about trying to keep their secrets. The story focuses more on the police investigation rather than the families and what they were going through, I would have preferred more of a mixture of both. The characters aren't very likeable, and I felt the ending was a bit rushed. It's told from multiple points of view. The pace was fast in the first part, then it was more of a steady pace in the second part.

There are so many different POV's that it does have some repetition, but I wasn't too bothered by that because we are slowly given little nuggets about why the children might have been kidnapped. Some things were pretty predictable and I wasn't thrilled with the 2 similar secrets from the parents. And the secret that started this all, while on the terrible side, was not really groundbreaking IMO.The location; I live west of where it’s set and particularly enjoyed all the references to Cirencester, where I worked for a couple of years. Set in the Cotswolds, the story centres on a group of schoolchildren who go on a school trip with a few of their teachers. When the bus fails to return on time, the parents begin to realise that something terrible must’ve happened to them. They have literally disappeared without a trace! When the empty bus is discovered along with the dead body of one of the teachers, panic sets in as the police do their best to solve the mystery.