Seduction

The day that marked the beginning of chaos, Elizabeth Penn waited at home, and her daughter wasn't there.
The terror, she knew, was linked to the other time.

Elizabeth Penn, an artist, lives on the Regent's Canal, in the dank, tree-shrouded no-man's land by Camden Lock. Every day, she sees familiar figures on the towpath - hippies on barges, local drug dealers, and cyclists shooting through the mist - as she watches for her daughter, ten-year-old Cleo.

Cleo vanished from a playground almost seven years ago. She was gone for under twenty-four hours - and the events of that lost interval are still uncertain. Now Elizabeth guards her fiercely, every moment of absence fraught with worry. Recently Cleo has been coming home late from school, evading her questions. As Elizabeth's anxiety escalates, spilling into her paintings and her dreams, her partner Sol insists that she should visit a psychologist, an idea she hates. After all, a shrink might ask her to talk about her own mother, and the memories she battles to suppress.

Taut and atmospheric, When Nobody's Looking is a disturbing journey into the darkness of the human mind, set in a menacing London landscape. A haunting story of motherhood, obsession and guilt, it confirms Joanna Briscoe as a master of suspense.