Caged Love

Robert returns home at four in the afternoon after a two-week business trip, only to be greeted by a silent house: his wife Olivia and their three children are gone. That very morning he had video-called his wife; the schedule on the wall showed she had picked the children up from school just twenty minutes earlier. Yet once the police get involved, they quickly find that the situation does not match Robert's account: Olivia had taken the children from school two weeks earlier, and the mother and children had not returned home since, leaving no clue as to their whereabouts. As the investigation unfolds, this seemingly respectable family is peeled back layer by layer. Nine years earlier, Olivia's boyfriend at the time had suddenly disappeared, and soon afterward her parents both died in accidents at the same time—and the officer in charge of the case then is one of those now reopening the investigation. The anxiety and cooperation Robert shows after returning home form a subtle contrast with the suspicious traces the police find in the house and the study. The novel uses a dual narrative, alternating between the police investigation and Olivia's own account: on one side, the police search for a break in the smallest details; on the other, Olivia tells how she was monitored, isolated, and stripped of her freedom step by step in her marriage, until she finally disappeared with her children. Originally titled Sleep Tight, the book explores more than a missing-person case—it is about a controlling relationship conducted in the name of love: when love means possession, means deprivation, means loss, who exactly is trapped in the cage? Tightly paced with layer upon layer of suspense and reversals, it is one of the representative works of Rachel Abbott and was selected for Amazon UK's annual editors' pick of suspense books, ranking near the top of the Amazon UK charts.