Every now and then I enjoy reading a good immersive thriller. Last year it was SJ Watson’s “Second Life” about a woman’s search for her missing sister and her adventures from creating a secret online identity. “The Widow” also taps into the nefarious corners of the internet at some points, but this psychological thriller centres on the case of a missing girl, the deceased man who was suspected of kidnapping her and his long-suffering wife-now-widow. This is Fiona Barton’s debut novel, but she’s had considerable practice writing about cases such as the dramatic one created in this story as she’s an experienced journalist. The story’s primary focus is not Glen Taylor, the primary suspect in a kidnapping case that’s been ongoing for four years, but Jean, the submissive and compliant wife who has stood always stood beside – but more often behind - him. The novel begins at a point when Glen has recently been killed in an accident and now Jean is left on her own with the media wanting her side of the story. What does she really think about her husband? How much does she know about the kidnapping? Is she lying to the police and reporters or is she lying to herself? These questions are explored over the course of this well-paced, suspenseful thriller.

At the beginning of the story I felt impatient with Jean because she’s initially so passive. She shows a wilful ignorance: “There is so much I want to ask, but so much I don't want to know.” While this is frustrating it’s also a true reflection of how some people evade looking at the truth. Without her husband to order her about, she knocks around her empty house until it’s invaded by skilled reporter Kate Waters who cosies up to Jean like a friend but really wants the big scoop. Gradually the extent of Jean’s introverted behaviour becomes more meaningful as her complex reasoning takes shape and she slowly reveals her version of events. The novel moves between 2010 when Jean is interviewed and 2006 when two-year-old Bella Elliot disappears from her single mother’s front garden. An investigation is launched by well-meaning detective inspector Bob Sparkes who becomes obsessed with solving the case. Bella’s mother Dawn launches her own campaign to find her daughter utilizing the media and stirring up public interest. The search eventually leads to Glen who becomes the focus of the case. What’s fascinating is the way his wife Jean gradually emerges from the background as she’s torn between her husband and the people investigating. Both sides try to manipulate her for their own purposes, but when she’s interviewed Jean is finally ready to assert her independence.

The novel really picks up pace half way through when a string of carefully placed clues start adding up, secrets are uncovered and Jean becomes more complex. I found the ending to be as satisfyingly dramatic as a thrilling crime drama. It’s particularly notable how well Barton writes about the methods journalists use to chase sensational stories like a kidnapping and how the media works in tandem with (or sometimes comes into conflict with) police investigations. “The Widow” is an engaging and well-executed thriller.

There is something both enticing and terrifying about the way Rosamond Lupton’s thriller “The Quality of Silence” draws you ever northward into the bleak frozen wasteland of northern Alaska. It’s a place of beauty where the starry night sky is startlingly clear and the Aurora Borealis gives fantastic light shows, but there are also deadly cold temperatures and snow storms that obliterate the landscape. A mother and daughter journey into the arctic to search for the father who is a wildlife photographer that has gone missing. The incredibly remote village of Anaktue where he’s been based has been completely destroyed in a mysterious explosion and all of its inhabitants are found dead. The mother, Yasmin, who is an English astrophysicist received a clue that her husband is still living. Because the authorities have given up the search, she takes on the perilous task of finding him herself. Her daughter Ruby is deaf and Yasmin thinks it’s too dangerous to leave her with anyone she meets along the way. So they drive as far north as humanly possible into a snowy wilderness while being pursued by a mysterious threatening individual. This is a story which pulled me in with sympathetic characters I felt increasingly anxious for as their rescue mission became bone-chillingly dangerous.

Needless to say, deafness is a terrible handicap - especially for a ten year old girl. Ruby has trouble socially because her mother insisted she enrol in a school with hearing children rather than be segregated into a special school. She must negotiate through a world designed for those who can hear and she must tolerate the way most people treat her differently – as someone to be ignored or pitied or talked down to. One of the most beautiful moments in the book is when Ruby strikes up a friendship with a kind truck driver named Adeeb who agrees to take her and Yasmin as far north as he can. The casual conversation they have about music draws Ruby into the kind of normality she’s so often excluded from because she’s labelled as different. Through this friendship, the special bond she has with her parents and from reading about Ruby’s own perspective we’re able to understand some of the extraordinary qualities she possesses. The silence she lives within gives her advantages and special knowledge the hearing world never even considers. Embedded within the very title of this novel is the understanding that deafness does not simply mean disability.

Along the way, Yasmin and Ruby witness a paraselene which are bright moon-like spots in the sky that appear only rarely alongside the actual moon in the arctic. Also known as mock moons.

I’ve written before about how tricky it is for an author to get a child’s voice right. See my review of Clair Cameron’s “The Bear” from last year. Lupton takes the best of both worlds in her novel by alternating her narrative between Ruby’s child voice and a more straight-forward omniscient narrator. This has a slightly jarring effect at first because it’s difficult for the reader to connect with any one voice. After some time it becomes more natural as scenes transition between the two perspectives giving both an inward and outward understanding of the action. Ruby’s voice veers dangerously close at times to a cloying sweetness, yet her perspective can also be wonderfully refreshing. Her thoughts on the division between her everyday and online identity feel especially pertinent for the newer generation: “It’s like there’s two worlds, the typed one, (like emails and Facebook and Twitter and bloggering) and then the ‘real’ one. So there are two me’s. And I’d like the real world to be the typed one because that’s where I can properly be me.” Ruby creates a unique voice for her Twitter profile to express the way words have a synaesthesia-like effect of creating sensations within her. It allows her an honesty and poetic beauty she cannot convey in her physical reality. These complexities make her a compelling and highly-endearing character.

The novel becomes effectively disjointed and surreal the further the pair travel into the snow and emptiness. It's as if their identities becomes stripped down alongside the frosty landscape. This had a hypnotic effect upon me as the atmospheric descriptions take on an increasingly surreal quality to coincide with the characters' mounting desperation and physical strain: "In our headlights there's huge sheets of snow, like shape-shifting ghosts haunting the road." Memories intrude upon the characters' consciousness so that the physical desolation of the landscape comes to represent feelings of aloneness in the world. The fight for survival is also one where the characters must solidify their connection to each other. Overlaying the chase that makes up the bulk of this story is a message about the environment. “The Quality of Silence” is a gripping, mesmerising read.