The Case of the Missing Kitchen

Accessible, warm and witty, Barbara Else's fifth novel is her most effervescent.

Suzie, a thirty-seven-year-old single mother, is the youngest of three sisters and a stubborn misfit. While Lara is now going for a top job in the Ministry of Customs and Philippa runs the charity organisation 'Suite Three', Suzie is an on-call chef with a bank account at zero, has a fifteen-year-old son in trouble at school and a ballet-crazy seven year old with head lice. Her love life should be great, as she's just won votes from the students across the road as the 'woman they'd most like to sleep with'. But Gifford, her disarming ex-husband, can't be trusted. She still can't talk to her ex-partner, Luke, and she is on the point of dumping her current lover Caine Smith, the ace police detective.

The worst week of Suzie's life begins when Caine summons her to the morgue to identify a woman's body. She arrives home, shocked, to find the place has been burgled. Caine insists Suzie and the children spend the night at his place. Suddenly her kids have gone missing and her world is falling apart. Over the next days, Suzie darts around the city driven by her ferocious maternal instinct and a perverse obstinacy that always seems to prevent her taking the most sensible course of action. Will she get to the bottom of the mystery — and how many mysteries are there, past and present? And what's happened to her kitchen?