A rich man's daughter and her baby son are kidnapped and held for ransom. Contact is made with the kidnappers and an exchange arranged. But it all goes wrong and the daughter is killed and the kidnappers vanish with the baby and are never heard from again.
Twenty years later, and a woman has come to the police for help finding her father who vanished at about the same time as the rich man's kidnapped grandson. The woman is desperate to find her father because her son is dying of cancer and needs a transplant and her father could be the donor, if he can be found.
All her life, she thought her father, Mick, was a miner who left his family behind and moved away to a nearby town, sending back money occasionally. But as the police investigate his disappearance, they discover he never moved to that town and the money was being sent by someone else who felt sorry for her mother.
Meanwhile, the rich man still longs to find his lost grandson and bring him home. . A reporter has stumbled across a compelling new piece of evidence concerning the kidnappers. She brings this evidence to the rich man and he brings it to the police and now the search is on once again to find the lost baby who is a baby no longer and is now a young man. If he is even still alive!
This was an OK mystery story. It was pretty clear that the vanished miner and the kidnapping, which both happened at about the same time and in about the same area, were most likely connected. One thing I found hard to understand was the miner's wife just accepting that he had moved to a nearby town without ever following up on that and seeing for herself that he had left her and his family behind. Supposedly she was ashamed because he a "scab" or, as he is called in the story, a "blackleg" or, if I am understanding it correctly, a "strikebreaker." I must admit that the book made so little impression on me, that when I sat down to write this, I couldn't even remember what it was about until I looked at the description on the back cover. I didn't dislike it, I also didn't love it, it was an OK read.
Here is a review by Publishers Weekly.
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