*** Richard Lloyd Parry is the Winner of the 2018 Rathbones Folio Prize ***In the summer of 2000, Jane Steare received the phone call every mother dreads. Her daughter Lucie Blackman - tall, blonde, and twenty-one years old - had stepped into the vastness of a Tokyo summer and disappeared forever. That winter, her dismembered remains were found buried in a desolate seaside cave.Her disappearance was mystifying. Had Lucie been abducted by a religious cult? Who was the mysterious man she had gone to meet? What did her work, as a 'hostess' in the notorious Roppongi district of Tokyo, really involve? And could Lucie's fate be linked to the disappearance of another girl some ten years earlier?Over the course of a decade, Richard Lloyd Parry has travelled to four continents to interview those caught up in the story and been given unprecedented access to Lucie's bitterly divided family to reveal the astonishing truth about Lucie and her fate.

'This is an extraordinary book which stands as far above the 'true crime' label as Paradise Lost does above the category 'verse'... No avenue is left unexplored, no thought is too oblique to be uttered, no psychological puzzle too disturbing to be investigated' - Bel Mooney, Daily Mail

'A skilful, definitive history of one of the most notorious crimes of the past decade' - Sunday Times

'Richard Lloyd Parry has produced a work not only of page-turning intensity but also of touching sensitivity and deep insight. That he could have created something almost noble from such base material is a minor miracle of literary alchemy. The book is brilliantly written' - David Pilling, Financial Times

'An extraordinary book, passionately and meticulously told... I read it with my breath held and found I couldn't relax, think or get on with my life until I'd finished it' - Julie Myerson

'Parry shows a rare compassion and a refusal to judge' - Jonathan Coe, Guardian, Books of the Year

'A sobering affair... A true crime thriller, sensitively handled and unsparing in its quest for answers' - Megan Walsh, The Times

'An evenhanded investigation of a murder' - New York Times

'At the heart of this extraordinary and brilliant book about the search, and its aftermath, in 2000 for a 21 year old British girl, Lucie Blackman, who disappeared one summer in Tokyo, in one of the darkest stories I've ever read?a truly disturbing but fascinating read.I read it in one horrified gulp' - Carla McKay, Daily Mail

'As mysterious as its title, this extraordinary true crime tale is up there with Truman Capote's In Cold Blood' - Toni & Guy Magazine