Hearts and Minds, By Amanda Craig

Polly Noble, an immigration lawyer and protagonist in Craig's previous novels who perfectly straddles the left-leaning sensibility and middle-class privilege of her North London tribe, has now shed her rich American husban and is going it alone as a divorced professional mother.

It is only when her Russian au pair goes missing that the novel offers a gripping dramatisation of the intersecting realities of London's 'melting pot' in which an underworld of sex traffickers, psychopaths and illegal immigrants live in alarmingly close proximity to the likes of Polly.