Little Children
Angela Marsons
371 pages
Bookouture
Published August 12, 2025
🗼🗼🗼🗼🗼
Little Children s the 22nd book in the utterly awesome DI Kim Stone police procedural series. I’ve read them all in order, but each story does stand alone, so this could be enjoyed regardless of whether you’ve met Kim before or not. However, as with most long running series, you’ll get far more out of it if you know the characters already. Yet again Marsons has produced a tense and compelling mystery that kept me hooked throughout.
Two pre-teen boys have gone missing in the seaside town of Blackpool in Lancashire, England. Kim’s team are asked to go help with the investigation. She soon learns that their boss has a hidden agenda: there have been reports of corruption in the local CID unit, and their DCI charges Kim with identifying the whistleblower so they can be protected. Finding their new colleagues hostile and resentful, Kim, Bryant, Stacey & Penn must do what they can to find the lost boys before it’s too late.
Often by this stage in a series, authors are running out of ideas, but not this one! I normally shy away from plotlines about missing children, but this one takes us in a different direction to the usual in terms of what’s going on. While the subject matter is about as horrific as you can get, you know that Kim will somehow save the day, so it never gets too dark. Marsons tends to research the topics she chooses extensively, but I hope that in this case it’s the product of her imagination, not something that’s really happening. As cyberwhizzkid Stacey reflects, you don’t even want to google it to find out because of what their algorithms might show you. My only criticism is the implausibility of the coincidence that links one subplot to the main story but it’s not a biggie and in no way detracts from my enjoyment of this excellent thriller. 4.5 stars rounded up for great writing and superb plotting.
Thanks to Bookouture for the ARC.
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