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Description
(Text)
A mom will do anything to save her kid. Anything.
"The missing boy is 10-year-old Alfie Risby, and to be perfectly honest with you, he's a little shit."
Florence Grimes is a thirty-one-year-old party girl who always takes the easy way out. Single, broke and unfulfilled after the humiliating end to her girl band career, she has only one reason to get out of bed each day: her ten-year-old son Dylan. But then Alfie Risby, her son s bully and the heir to a vast frozen food empire, mysteriously vanishes during a class trip, and Dylan becomes the prime suspect. Florence, for once, is faced with a task she can t quit: She s got to find Alfie and clear her son s name, or risk losing Dylan forever.
The only problem? Florence has no useful skills, let alone investigative ones, and all the other school moms hate her. Oh, and Florence has a reason to suspect Dylan might not be as innocent as she d like to believe...
(Review)
Everyone s talking about Florence!
As seen in
Real Simple NPR, Books We Love 2025 Marie Claire Glamour New York Post TIME Magazine Reader's Digest BookPage Jordy's Book Club
"A biting, twisty, utter delight." Jessica Knoll, New York Times bestselling author of Luckiest Girl Alive and Bright Young Women
"A smirking thriller that never threatens to take itself too seriously." NPR
"Put this at the top of your To-Be-Read list!" Liv Constantine, New York Times bestselling author of The Next Mrs. Parrish
"Part social comedy, part thriller. . . . Harman pulls it off." Wall Street Journal
"Ruefully funny and mildly disturbing." Oprah Daily
"Plenty of dark humor, and more than a little biting social commentary. . . . If twisty, voice-driven novels like First Lie Wins and Listen for the Lie are your jam, then make room on the shelf for this cracking debut." Amazon Book Review
"Hilarious and poignant and absol
(Extract)
Prologue
The missing boy is 10-year-old Alfie Risby, and to be perfectly honest with you, he s a little shit.
I realize that s a horrible thing to say about a child, particularly one who is missing. But - and I m not proud of this - if I had to choose a boy in Dylan s class to vanish in broad daylight, Alfie would ve been top of my list.
There are some kids you just kind of want to punch, and Alfie was one of them. Perhaps it was his hair - that pale red shade we used to call strawberry blonde. Or his dull, raisin-coloured eyes. Or the way his sharp little teeth gave him a distinctly ferret-like appearance.
Their sharpness is a point of fact: Last year he bit his nanny, Cecilia, so hard she needed stitches. For weeks, she appeared at afternoon pick-up like a sad ghost, clutching her bandaged forearm.
The one time I volunteered to chaperone a school trip, a class picnic to Hampstead Heath, Alfie leaned over a plate of sausage rolls and told me, verycasually, as if we were two adults at a bar, that he quite liked my slag fingernails.
And then there was his family. They weren t just run-of-the-mill, St. Angeles rich. They were in a whole other league.
Like richer than God, one of the other mothers had whispered to me during last year s spring fundraiser, as we arranged sugar cookies on tiny plastic trays.
But if I m being honest, my feelings about Alfie had nothing to do with his hair or his wealth or his ferret teeth. No. My dislike of Alfie stemmed entirely from the way he treated Dylan, my precocious, sensitive only son, like he was a bug to be crushed.
And nobody crushes my kid.
(Author portrait)
Sarah Harman is an American living in London. She worked most recently as a foreign correspondent for NBC News, reporting on-air for Today, Nightly News, and MSNBC. She s a graduate of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Her debut novel All the Other Mothers Hate Me won the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize in 2023.
