Ask My Sister

Anna receives a photograph of her kitchen from her own email address. Her niece is missing, her sister is lying, and a second image shows the girl restrained. To save her before the tide closes the last route out, Anna must tell the truth about the family secret she once helped bury, even if it makes her part of the crime.

At 10:40 p.m., Anna Vale receives a photograph of her kitchen from her own email address. The room is empty except for the blue hair clip she repaired for her niece. The back door is locked. The front door is locked. Nobody else has a key. Then Anna’s sister Beatrice arrives and says fifteen-year-old Poppy left the house alone. Anna knows that is not true. She also knows she has lied for Beatrice before, about the night Beatrice’s husband died in a locked washhouse. She called it protection. She signed the statement. She never expected the lie to reach Poppy. Now a second photograph shows Poppy restrained inside a vehicle, with a message that gives the police less than eight hours to find her. The search becomes a race through tidewater buildings, borrowed vans, damaged records, and a family history neither sister will tell cleanly. Anna wants to save the girl. First she has to work out why Poppy sent the photograph to her, what Beatrice is trying to make her repeat, and what Anna herself did the last time she obeyed her sister. Ask My Sister is a domestic psychological thriller about trust, complicity, and the cost of being the person everyone relies on. The person you trust with the door may be the reason it is locked.