A Place of Execution

⚖The case for it

A girl vanishes from a remote Derbyshire village in 1963. Decades later, a journalist reopens the case. The final twist redefines everything that came before.

— the canon

✕The case against

Everything depends on a single late reveal, and on whether you accept that an entire village, plus the narrative itself, kept it from you for the length of the book. The 1963 procedural is superb; the modern frame around journalist Catherine Heathcote is thin by comparison, there mostly to spring the trap.

— the honest librarian