The Gripping DS Jon Roth Debut
Everyone is determined to call missing eleven-year-old Cassie Edwards a runaway.
Everyone except her mother.
Detective Sergeant Jon Roth, the most investigated cop on the Force, exiled to a suburban cop shop basement until he retires or Internal Affairs boots him out of the job, is dragged into the case.
Roth soon finds himself wading through a tangled conspiracy of lies and deceit, with powerful people willing to kill to keep Roth from discovering what really happened to Cassie Edwards. At the same time as the Cassie Edwards case is being buried, another missing teen is the keen focus of wall-to-wall media attention when the sixteen-year-old daughter of wealthy Eastern Suburbs parents also goes missing.
Are the cases connected? Is some serial kidnapper at work? Or is something darker lurking in the city’s underbelly?
DS Jon Roth risks everything for the truth about missing 11-year-old Cassie Edwards—his job, his family, even his own life—but in this case, he might just realise that some mysteries are best left unsolved.
Lost? Missing? Murdered?
Start Reading In Plain View…
Missing persons are the kinds of cases cops never want to get dragged into. Murder, robbery, rape, any other kind of mayhem the dark underbelly of this city can throw up, sure, but missing persons?
Mispers are a recipe for disaster.
The odds are stacked against you when people disappear. Either they don’t want to be found, or whoever took them is keen to make sure you don’t find out what happened to them. And the whole thing is on a ticking clock that gets louder every day the missing stay gone.
When eleven-year-old Cassie Edwards disappeared, the city didn’t skip a beat. No posters adorned the lamp posts; no frantic broadcasts filled the news. Even in a town renowned for its casual indifference to the plight of its unwanted, a missing eleven-year-old should have caused waves.
The Stories Behind the Story…
In Plain View
Every year, about 38,000 people are reported missing, including around 3,000 children aged 0 to 12 and around 19,000 young people aged 13 to 17.
Some 440 of these kids are never seen again.
Set in the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney, away from the glittering sunny beaches and idyllic stereotypes of the Emerald City, In Plain View peers into the underbelly of the city, the people, the society, its institutions, even its architecture, through the eyes of a Detective Sergeant Jon Roth.
Roth is a detective despised by other cops, a cop the on the most wanted list of “toe-cutters and headhunters” in the hated Professional Standards Command (once known as Internal Affairs), but as we see, Roth is hated more because of who he is than what he has done.
Read about the stories that inspired the novel (on Substack).