Weeping Angels, Riley Chance

‘No one will invest in a business focussed on family violence – it’s the opposite of sexy.’

Lauren Brown, owner of Weeping Angels, smiled. ‘Maybe to men.’

Lauren Brown has a booming business on her hands - an agency that helps victims of family violence obtain protection orders - something notoriously difficult in a world that seems more comfortable in forcing women to prove guilt, then men to prove innocence, but Lauren's also no amateur. She obsessively guards her privacy, and her past, preferring her personal life to remain well in the shadows, until it no longer can.

Contacting Investigative Journalist Grace Marks, Lauren wants her help in putting pressure on the government to fix the broken legal system, although soon after that initial foray, Lauren disappears after visiting a friend. A disappearance the police write off as "just another missing person", but not so Grace. But to find her, she also must find out who she really is, and what's the reason for Lauren's obsessive pursuit of privacy.

Until this book I didn't realise that The Democracy Game, Surveillance and this one were all part of a series featuring Marks. It's a series that takes on current day topics in an engaging and very readable manner. WEEPING ANGELS has that disappearance at its core, with the complication here being that it is very hard to find somebody when you don't know who they are, or even where they live.

Which means that Grace has a number of big problems on her hands with this search, something that was portrayed very well indeed in this novel which makes some pointed observations whilst never losing the idea that this is a fictional plot that has to engage the reader. Whilst clearly showing the risk that too many women are put at by the ones that used to be closest to them, it carves out the idea of the disappearance of somebody who nobody knew in the first place being a very tricky problem to solve.