On Christmas Eve, 1975, twin five-year olds Miles and Florrie stand outside a record store, dressed as angels for a Christmas pageant and waiting for their absent-minded mother to finish her shopping. Florrie's a bit of a bully, and Miles runs away from her and disappears. Hours later police find a child's hand nailed to a tree next to a feather from an angel costume, but by the next morning it's confirmed that the hand is not Miles's. The rest of the book follows several characters who are involved in either the crime or the investigation. The timeline goes back and forth between 1975 and 1995, when a young woman, soon revealed to be Florrie, arrives from England to talk to the only person to have been convicted in Miles's disappearance, newly freed on a technicality and hopefully willing to talk about what really happened to him.

This is superb suspense, with many twists and turns and a haunting and very unusual crime unprecedented in my reading. The psychedelic community of 1970s San Francisco looms large, and I found this aspect compelling and realistic, along with very realistic characters and dialogue. Hewson is the author of the Nic Costa mystery series set in Rome, but this is an earlier stand alone. It's a terrific find and available for free for Amazon Prime customers and only 99 cents for other Kindle and Kindle app readers. (Be sure to search for the author and title on the Amazon site, because the link from LT leads to a listing which doesn't include the Kindle version.) ( )