Why a Booktrail?
1997, 2000s: A missing girl, a shoe discovered, a secret waiting to be found
Local Girl Missing
What you need to know before your trail
Frankie and Sophie have been best friends for as long as they can both remember. Sophie moved with her mum to Oldcliffe on Sea in order to escape Sophie’s violent father and so moved to the same primary school as Frankie. However one night Sophie goes missing and the only trace of her seems to be a single trainer on the old seaside pier.
20 years later and Frankie gets a call which will see her head back to her old town and to try and find out what happened to her. But as soon as she starts looking into the past, threatening letters start to arrive. Someone knows what happened on the pier that night.
Travel Guide
Oldcliffe on Sea
Have you ever been to a seaside resort out of season, when the wind is bitter cold, the ice -cream vans are long gone, all the rides and amusements are locked up and even the stray dogs have moved on. That’s the kind of place you get to visit in Local Girl Missing. Oldcliffe on Sea is fictional and it’s just as well as the pier is dilapidated, the scenery faded and the atmosphere full of creepy chills and secrets floating around, ready to slap you in the face like the discarded chip packets.
Sophie is believed to have been swept out to sea into the Bristol Channel and then remains are found on a beach in Brean Somerset.
“We would send hours dreaming about escaping the biting winds that whistled through the town shaking the bare branches of the trees and throwing sand in our path so that we could feel the grit of it between our teeth”
“Oldcliffe out of season was grey and depressing”
Booktrailer Review
Clare:@thebooktrailer
There’s something very exciting and chilling about out of season seaside towns. The ghost of summer’s past and the whispers of forgotten memories, whistling around in the wind.
The story is told in past and present by Sophie and Frankie respectively and it’s a technique that works very well. Two friends, one running from danger and then falling victim to a suspected drowning. A friend coming back to look for the truth encouraged by the friend’s brother. All very cloak and danger. And in a place where everything else seems to have faded apart from secrets of the past. Very interesting.
OldCliffe is a strange old place. One person I met in the novel I really didn’t like. Another I didn’t believe and many I doubted. Just what the novel is all about really.
It’s very twisty and does make you think. I did guess some of it but overall it was a good read that I enjoyed.
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