Review: HAS ANYONE SEEN CHARLOTTE SALTER? Nicci French

• 
   this edition from Amazon on Kindle
  
• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0C8JWHT8S
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster UK (February 29, 2024
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 541 pages
• Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 006329835X

Synopsis (Amazon)

She’s loved by all who meet her. But someone wants her gone . . .

Then

When beautiful and vivacious Charlotte Salter fails to turn up to her husband Alec’s 50th birthday party, her kids are worried, but Alec is not. As the days pass and there’s still no word from Charlie, her daughter, Etty, and her sons, Niall, Paul and Ollie, all struggle to come to terms with her disappearance.
How can anyone just vanish without a trace?
Left with no answers and in limbo, the Salter children try and go on with their lives, all the while thinking that their mother’s killer is potentially very close to home.

Now

After years away, Etty returns home to the small East Anglian village where she grew up to help move her father into a care home. Now in his eighties, Alec has dementia and often mistakes his daughter for her mother.
Etty is a changed woman from the trouble-free girl she was when Charlie was still around - all the Salter children have spent decades running and hiding from their mother’s disappearance.
But when their childhood friends, Greg and Morgen Ackerley, decide to do a podcast about Charlotte’s disappearance, it seems like the town’s buried secrets – and the Salters’ – might finally come to light.

After all this time, will they finally find out what really happened to Charlotte Salter?

My Take

An absolutely gripping read. 

The story opens with Alec Salter's 50th birthday party, the one that his wife Charlie never appeared at, even though she was expected. The party finished early but Charlie never came home.

A police investigation was held but Charlie was never found. 

And now, 30 years later, Alec has dementia and his children have made the decision to move him into a care home, and to sell the house. A podcast revisits the events of 30 years ago, opens old wounds, and asks locals and family to remember what happened.

Another death results in another police investigation.

There is plenty of opportunity for readers to pit their little grey cells against the evidence and to come up with their own theories of what happened to Charlotte Salter.

My rating: 5.0 

I've also read

• 4.3, BLUE MONDAY
• 4.5, TUESDAY'S GONE
• 4.7, WAITING FOR WEDNESDAY
• 4.7, FRIDAY ON MY MIND
• 4.7, THE LYING ROOM
• 4.5, DAY OF THE DEAD
• 4.7, SECRET SMILE
  
• 4.6, THE UNHEARD 
• 4.8, THE FAVOUR