An easy, contemporary crime/drama set on the outskirts of Canberra. An anxious mother leaves her child with the mothers of her playgroup and, in the six minutes it takes to run her errand, her daughter goes missing.
If you enjoy books by Liane Moriarty, then you’ll probably like this one. ( )

We all know of cases of young children who have gone missing in Australia and never been found.

Lexie Parker dashes to the shop across the road from the playgroup and returns just over 6 minutes later to find that 3 year old Bella has gone missing. The other 3 mums have not noticed her absence and the other 4 children are unreliable witnesses. This is a mother's worst nightmare and as the days roll on Lexie feels that it just reinforces what a bad mother she is.

But not everyone is telling the truth about themselves and their background and the reader is required to sift the evidence and to find out their secrets.

The local community rallies to look for Bella through the night, the police are called in, and they are not sure whether one of the parents is not to blame.

Social media is used to spread the word but this also invites the trolls to come out and point the finger at Lexie and her husband.

A really interesting read. ( )

I didn’t get beyond page 82. The story was just going nowhere. It needed something out of the ordinary to create more mystery. Also It’s a bit over-written. Not much for the reader to do here. ( )

“Three hundred and seventy-one, three hundred and seventy-two, three hundred and seventy-three...I’ve made it. I can stop counting now. Three hundred and seventy-three seconds. Six minutes.”

Six minutes after leaving her daughter, Bella, playing happily with her friends at playgroup, Lexie Parker returns to discover the three year old is missing, and none of the mothers that were supposed to be watching her can tell Lexie where her daughter went. Lexie clings to the idea that Bella has somehow simply wandered away, and be will found any minute, but as the hours pass and an extensive police search fails to find her, Lexie has to face other frightening possibilities. Someone knows what happened in those six minutes, but who?

McGovern provides us with plenty of suspects in the abduction of Bella, and keeps us guessing as the plot unfolds. The narrative moves between the perspectives of several characters, among them Lexie, her husband and Bella’s father, Marty, the investigating officer, Detective Sergeant Caruso, and Tara, one of the mother’s present at the playgroup when Bella went missing.

Everyone has secrets, some which prove to be relevant to Bella’s disappearance, some not, and the story is told in such a way that it’s almost impossible to guess where guilt or innocence may lie. While the question of what happened to Bella is Intriguing on its own, there is more than the one mystery in Six Minutes that kept me turning the pages.

I haven’t read many books set in Canberra (in the Australian Capital Territory), but the small community on the fringe of the city felt authentic and familiar. Residents turn out in force to help search for Bella, the media descends and causes chaos, and outsiders, and insiders, speculate wildly on social media, eager to be heard.

With a compelling cast of characters and a riveting plot, Six Minutes is an engrossing thriller from debut author Petronella McGovern. ( )