ALICE Fancourt gives birth to her first child, Florence, just two weeks before she ventures out of the house for the first time.

Gone just two hours she returns to find the door open, her husband asleep and Florence replaced with a different baby.

With a fragmented history of mental illness, Alice - who lives with her husband David, his mother and David's son Felix from a previous marriage - is understandably distressed but with no other baby reported missing, she struggles to convince anyone that she is telling the truth.

To put everybody's mind at rest Alice's mother-in-law agrees to pay for a private DNA test but during the week they wait for the results, David sets out to discredit Alice further through merciless tricks and mind games.

When Alice disappears with the baby the night ahead of the DNA test the police are finally forced to take the situation seriously.

Unwittingly, Detective Simon Waterhouse uncovers the Fancourt family's bizarre past of estranged children, as well as the murder of David's ex-wife in the house grounds, and so begins a frenzied race against time to find Alice and her baby before the worst happens.

Often with crime thrillers, by the time you reach the halfway point you have at least developed some kind of theory about who did it - not in this book!

I could barely put it down and with just 15 pages left until the end, I was still trying to figure out if an actual crime had even been committed at all. Definitely worth a read.

Lydia Hayward