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The Greenway is the kind of British psychological crime debut that gets called "literary" for reasons that have more to do with restraint than with prose pyrotechnics. Twenty years after a five-year-old girl vanished on a country footpath in East Anglia, her now-adult cousin returns to the village with his wife to confront the past. While they are there, another little girl disappears in the same way.
Jane Adams is interested in trauma the way the late-90s wave of British crime writers tended to be: as something that does not leave the body, that distorts memory, that turns adults into people who cannot quite live in the present. The investigation is partly conducted by the cousin Cassie and her husband and partly by DI Mike Croft, who would go on to lead a long Jane Adams series.
The book's strength is its atmosphere. The greenway itself, the disused medieval pathway between two villages, has the kind of dread that lifts off the page. Four stars. A subtle debut that does not announce itself but stays with you.
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