A teenage girl. A message on a mirror. A mother who can’t remember the night before.

When fifteen-year-old Olivia Deacon vanishes from her Edinburgh bedroom overnight, the only evidence is a cracked mirror with two words written in red: NEVER FORGET. Her mother woke at half past six and found the room empty – but she wasn’t asleep. She was unconscious. The wine was a gift.

DI Sam Winter is pulled into Olivia’s disappearance as the case splinters in every direction: a deadbeat father declared missing and probably dead, a boyfriend with a convenient alibi, a drilled phone and a locked laptop, plus a girl who kept her secrets in notebooks rather than on screens. Olivia didn’t run. She was taken by someone who knew the alarm code, knew the routines, and took the time to leave a message nobody yet understands.

The words on the mirror aren’t random. They’re a reckoning — for something that happened long before Olivia was old enough to know about it. As Winter unpicks the tangle of loss, silence and buried resentment at the heart of the family, she begins to understand that whoever took Olivia isn’t finished. And that the clock has been running for a very long time.

No Need To Fear is the third DI Sam Winter thriller: sharp, darkly funny Scottish crime fiction set in Edinburgh.