A BUNCH OF DAISIES

At its heart is Daisy Carroway, who is not a detective or a hero. She is someone who makes bad jokes when she is frightened, who worries about saying the wrong thing, and who loves her best friend Genna enough to keep asking questions when everyone else tells her to stop. When Genna vanishes one afternoon—leaving only a text message and a bag on the canal path—Daisy begins to follow a trail that leads her into corners of the world she did not know existed: corrupt institutions, family secrets, and the kind of people who believe that silence is safer than truth. The further she goes, the more dangerous it becomes, and the clearer it becomes that almost everyone around her is choosing what to hide.

She saw it before she understood what she was seeing. A shape on the gravel, dark against the pale stones. A bag. Genna’s bag, the green canvas one with the leather strap that Genna had bought from a charity shop in Whitstable two summers ago, the one Daisy had teased her about because it smelled of mothballs for a week. Daisy stopped walking. Her hand went to her own bag strap and gripped it. Turning point – Chapter 1