“Hamer’s dark tale of the lost and found is nearly impossible to put down.” —Booklist
It’s a parent’s worst nightmare: a missing child. For newly single mom Beth, the possibility is a constant, gnawing worry, because her dreamy eight-year-old daughter, Carmel, has a tendency to wander off.
And then one day, it happens: Beth takes Carmel to a local outdoor festival, they get separated in the crowd, and Carmel is gone.
Shattered, Beth finds herself on a lonely, grim, and harrowing mission to find her daughter…even as the authorities advise her that signs indicate Carmel may be gone for good.
Carmel, meanwhile, is on an extraordinary and terrifying journey of her own, a journey that requries her to live by her wits while trying to keep in her head— at all times— a vision of her mother.
Alternating between Beth’s story and Carmel’s, and written in gripping prose, The Girl in the Red Coat —- like Emma Donoghue’s Room and M. L. Stedman’s The Light Between Oceans — is an utterly immersive story that’s impossible to put down…and impossible to forget.