"Nearly fifty years ago in the town of Bradfield, in Yorkshire, a beautiful Italian girl vanished and a community mourned and then forgot her. It was a rainy Coronation Day in 1953 when Mariella Bonetti disappeared, and the residents of the crowded apartment building where she lived were busy families, some friendly, some distant, but all slowly recovering from the havoc a world war wrought." "Then, when a long-buried skeleton is unearthed almost fifty years later at the site after the building is demolished, DCI Michael Thackeray heads the official investigation into the skeleton's identity. His sometime girlfriend, reporter Laura Ackroyd, supplies one piece of information: her father lived in the building when he was growing up. Laura's grandmother then revives the story of the beautiful Italian girl who went missing on Coronation Day, and a simple case turns complicated and plagued by the faults of memory and prejudice. Thackeray's efforts to track down the only witnesses - the now-grown children who lived there, too, including Laura's father - help him build a case, but they also disturb a long-dormant killer."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved