Detective Lauren Pengelly has only been part of the Penzance police force for less than two years, but that’s enough time to know that the sleepy Cornish town doesn’t see many murders. So, when the bones of a woman with a hole in her skull are discovered behind a derelict cottage, she immediately assumes the worst.

Rallying her team, Lauren is flooded with a strange sense of relief when the bones turn out to be almost twenty years old, not a recent victim. But it quickly turns to dread when she receives her second heart-stopping call of the day–a little girl, Isla, has been kidnapped from her nursery and seemingly vanished, despite strict security in the building. Are the two cases connected, or could the peaceful town of Penzance be harbouring more than one monster?

With the help of Detective Matt Price, her newly arrived second-in-command, Lauren is certain the suspicious behaviour of Isla’s estranged father on the day of her disappearance is a critical clue. But when another little girl is taken, again from her nursery in the middle of the day, it’s clear Lauren and Matt are still dangerously far away from discovering the harrowing truth…

‘The Lost Girls Of Penzance‘ (2023) is the first book in a five-book British Police Procedural series set in Cornwall. I hadn’t read any of Sally Rigby’s books before. I picked this one because I liked the setting, the opening pages worked, the audiobook was less than seven hours long, it was narrated by Clare Corbett and, if I liked it, it would give me a new series to follow.

I listened to most of the book during a slow, tedious two hundred mile drive north and then finished it off when I got there because I wanted to know who had done what.

I had fun with the book, in a mild, low-key way. It was a great listen-to-it-while-doing-something-else audiobook. It was unchallenging, gentle and focused more on the police officers than on the crimes but had enough of a mystery at its heart to keep me curious.

There was nothing in the story that I haven’t read in many other police procedurals but there were no gaffs or annoyances either. The plot involved the discovery of human bones in the grounds of an abandoned house and the abduction of little girls from their day nurseries. Either or both of these could have been gruesome but, although there was a lot of anxiety about the lost girls, the story was never in danger of getting into traumatic territory. The bones provided a puzzle to be worked on when all that could be done to find the girls had been done. The search for the girls was, until the last abduction, mostly a vehicle for displaying how Lauren Pengelly led her team (with too much formality and no knack for winning loyalty or engendering team spirit) and how her new sergeant, Matt Price, integrated into the team (fairly effortlessly apart from missing the tools and teams he’d had on the much bigger force he’d left behind). The police officers in the team were drawn in a competent, light-weight TV series way that was easy to follow and often amusing. The contrasts between the backgrounds, approaches and motivations of Pengelly and Price kept things moving along nicely.

I’ve downloaded the next book in the series, ‘The Hidden Graves Of St. Ives‘ to listen to when I have my next long drive.

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