Hidden by Katy Gardner

A Hide and seek game between a mother and daughter went very wrong when the daughter could not be found.
Poppy, a seven-year old girl had been living with her mother (Mel) since she was born; just the two of them.
When Mel met with her prospective customer whom she was doing her valuation work for his place, it soon turned out that he was also his prospective love of her life.
The whirlwind romance soon became steady and Mel married Simon Stenning and moved in with him; into a warehouse which was under renovation works in Kent.
Mel then gave birth to little Joey; fondly known as Jo and together the family of four was happy.
When Poppy started getting sulky about changing to a new environment and having to make new friends, Mel constantly got cross with her.
Things got worse when Poppy started claiming that she had seen a ghost in the house; across her room, and the ghost is sometimes in the form of a fat shape.
She was terrified and Mel brushed her off as her desperate way of gaining attention.

However, during the period when Poppy went missing, Mel was forced to recall all the incidents which had happened with the comfort of Sandra; an officer who was trying to help her and her best friend, Trish whom she met at the park when she just moved to the new place.

Mel could not help getting suspicious of Simon who was also missing at the same time when Poppy went into hiding and it was his car that she heard at that time, driving away.
When police reports that the car was spotted on the highway with a little girl fitting the description of Poppy's, Mel was forced to face the truth and to recollect all her memories of the sinister past of Simon with his mother whom he never liked/trusted, and his on-off relationship with his ex-girlfriend Rosa Montague who was reported missing, and his one night stand with prostitute Jenning who ended up killed, and of course, her stunned reaction when the cops just appeared at her doorstep yesterday to take a sample of DNA from Simon and to hold him arrested for a murder case.

With all evidence pointing to Simon and the increasing hours of Poppy missing, Mel has to be fast to recall every little detail of her relationship with Simon and to provide the clue to finding Poppy.
It was a race against time; as both Mel and Detective Dave Gosforth hits the trail of the murderer and the consequence of Poppy's disappearance and making sense of it all.

The story started off at a good pace but then lagged in the middle as Mel seemed to be stuck recalling all the details of her life with Simon.
There were too much details and it became draggy and boring as the writer spent a huge amount of words to describe the chronology of the events.
However, the pace picked up again towards the end as the story breathlessly reveals the true identity of the killer, in a most fashionable and surprising manner.

As the tagline on the book says, "The Killer is in the last place that you look"

I shall not reveal the spoiler...but this was well-thought and brilliantly written to take your breath away!