Ebokio

ABSENT, NOT MISSING

ABSENT, NOT MISSING by Julian Ashvale – ebook cover

There is a box on a police form that means nobody is coming, and a girl in Brindleford has been inside it for nine days. Nora Bellamy is fifty-three and has...

About this ebook

ABSENT, NOT MISSING by Julian Ashvale is available in the Ebokio digital catalog as an EPUB ebook.

Price: £11.50. Language: English. Categories: Fiction & Literature.

There is a box on a police form that means nobody is coming, and a girl in Brindleford has been inside it for nine days. Nora Bellamy is fifty-three and has no power at all.

For eleven years she has been an appropriate adult — the volunteer the law obliges the police to call before they may interview a child or a vulnerable person. She has no warrant, no authority and no right to ask a single question.

She is the woman who sits beside you at four in the morning under a light that never goes off, and whose only skill is that people who trust nobody will sometimes talk to her.

On the eighth of November a man is brought into custody for putting a brick through an estate agent's window and then sitting down on the pavement to wait. He is twenty-eight, he has a learning disability, and under pressure he has no speech at all.

He has asked for Nora Bellamy by name. In the fourth hour he writes eight words on the back of a custody form and turns it round so that only she can see it. Kay Mellis is seventeen.

She has been gone nine days, and because she is a child in care with a history of running, a duty inspector graded her ABSENT rather than MISSING at two in the morning — which means no log, no search, no officer, and nobody looking.

The only person in the county who knows where she is will not say it to a detective, a solicitor or a recording device.

He will sell it to Nora in pieces, and every piece has a price, and the price is the one thing Nora Bellamy has never said out loud to anybody in twenty-two years.

Above a locked door on the top landing of an ordinary terraced house, Kay is working out how to make a sound that four adults downstairs cannot explain away as pigeons. And the man who put her up there is not a monster.

He is a local businessman with an award on his office wall who made one decision in one bad hour, and who has spent every hour since failing to find a way out of it that does not end him — and he is running out of hours faster than anybody except the reader can see.

ABSENT, NOT MISSING is a crime novel with no gore in it and no rest in it: a countdown, a two-hander, and the quietest, most infuriating villain in British fiction, which is a form on a screen with a box on it.

It is about who gets believed, what a written record is actually for, and what it costs a woman with no authority whatsoever to say, out loud, what she thinks somebody meant. Every clue is on the page. Nothing is hidden from you that is hidden from her.

When you reach the last twenty pages you will understand that you were told where the girl was in the first chapter — and you will want to go straight back to the beginning and check. Start it tonight.

And when you finish it, tell one other reader what was in those eight words, and leave a review so the next person finds it too.

Book details

Details: 246 pages, about 68,841 words, published by Julian Ashvale, publication date 5 September 2026.

Estimated reading time: about 4.5 hours.

Format, language, and reading

ABSENT, NOT MISSING is delivered as an EPUB ebook in English, and reads on phone, tablet, or computer through the Ebokio web reader with no app to install and no DRM.

Buyers can use Ebokio reading tools where supported, including adjustable themes and fonts, AI read aloud and text to speech, summaries, and Ask This Book for eligible owned titles.

Related ebooks

More by Julian Ashvale

EBOKIO LTD · Registered in England and Wales · Company No. 17308940 · Registered office: 128 City Road, London EC1V 2NX, United Kingdom