8)‘Connor knows that after this – for he has to believe there is an after – he will be more vigilant, more inquisitive. The car waiting at the lights, the one speeding in a residential area – who is driving them and what hidden cargo are they carrying? Connor will always wonder.’

If the news is to be believed, crime is all around us and yet we very rarely see it. Why do you think this is?

9)The local radio station asked people to tweet their thoughts on the missing boys using #TheTaken. What are your opinions on social media being used in this way?

10)Were you satisfied with the ending?

Extract

Turn the page for an exclusive extract of The Stolen Sisters, the gripping and unputdownable thriller from Louise Jensen

Sisterhood binds them. Trauma defines them. Will secrets tear them apart?

Available to buy now!

Chapter One

Carly

Then

When Carly looked back at that day the memory was in shades of grey; the trauma had sucked the blue from the sky, the green from the freshly mown grass. She had sat on the back doorstep, the coolness of the concrete permeating through her school skirt, the late-afternoon sun warming her bare arms. Carly remembers now the blackness of a beetle scurrying down the path before it disappeared into the soil under the rose bush. The stark white of the twins’ socks, bunched below their knees.

Inconsequential details that later the police would jot in their notebooks as though Carly was somehow being a great help but she knew she wasn’t, and worse than that, she knew it was entirely her fault.

It had all been so frustratingly normal. Leah and Marie had shrieked in mock disgust as Bruno, their boxer, bounded towards them, drool spilling from his jowls. But their screams then still carried an undercurrent of happiness, not like later when their cries were full of fear and there was nowhere to run to.

The things that have stayed with Carly are this.

The way her fingers gripped the cumbersome Nokia in her hand as though she was clutching a secret. Her annoyance as she angled her screen to avoid the glare, never dreaming that soon she would be craving daylight.

Fresh air.

Space.

The pounding in her head increasing as the girls bounced a tennis ball between them across the patio. The way she had snapped at the twins as though it was their fault Dean Malden hadn’t texted her. Of all the things that she could, that she should, feel guilty about, she had never forgiven herself that the last words she spoke to her sisters before they were all irrevocably damaged was in anger rather than kindness.

Although in truth, she had never forgiven herself for any of it.